What You’ll Learn
- How to create an application QoS policy
- How to deploy a policy
What You’ll Need
- Cisco DNA Center 2.x+
- A network device in inventory
Quality of service (QoS) is the process that allows a network to provide preferential service to specific classes of network traffic. This process allows you to help ensure that the critical applications on your network have the resources required to meet their business objectives.
Cisco DNA Center uses application policies to configure QoS in the network. In our application policies, we will have:
Application Sets: Applications with similar traffic needs. These are organized into specific business-relevance groups that define the priority.
Site Scope: Sites to which application policies are applied. These can be site scopes for wired policies or Service Set Identifiers (SSIDs) for wireless policies.
Cisco DNA Center will then take these policies, translate them to the necessary CLI, and deploy the configuration. Cisco DNA Center will configure the policies based on the type of device and feature set available, so this is no longer something that we need to consider when designing and deploying QoS manually.
For more information about application policies, business-relevant groups, and other topics check out the Cisco DNA Center User Guide.
The first thing we will to do is head to the main menu and choose Policy > Application QoS > Application Policies.
Click Add at the top right to create a new wired policy.
- Enter the name MyWiredQOS, leave Wired selected, and click 0 Sites next to Site Scope to set the scope.
- On the Site Scope window, click Edit Scope.
- Put a check next to the site that we want to target—in this case, DNAC-Branch.
Note: Optionally, if we want to exclude specific devices, interfaces, or specify a WAN interface, go to the Configure Devices option seen when clicking the gear or the ellipsis (…) on DNAC 2.5.x.
Our policy is complete! We are using Cisco Validated Design by default for classification of our applications and queuing profiles. You can get more information on editing the defaults here. We are now going to preview, precheck, and then deploy our policy.
When we create a policy, we have the option to do a preview and a precheck. We access them by clicking the kebab menu next to Deploy.
(Optional) Preview
Preview generates the CLI commands that will be applied to the device, allowing you to review the changes.
- When we click Preview we will see the list of devices at the specified sites.
- We will click Generate to have Cisco DNA Center generate the CLI that it will deploy. After the CLI is generated, click View to review it.
We can close these windows by clicking the X on the top right.
(Optional) Pre-Check
Pre-Check verifies that the devices in the site scope are supported.
When we click Pre-Check we will get a pop-up warning that it may take a while. Click Yes.
Once completed, we will see a list of devices in the chosen sites and their precheck result.
We have no errors or warnings, so we can close this page by clicking the X on the top right.
Deploy
We have now reviewed the CLI that we will be pushing out and verified support for our QoS policy. It is now time to deploy it.
- Click the Deploy button.
- Schedule deployment for now or a later time. We will choose Now and click Apply.
- We will get a view of the status of the deployment. We will be notified of any successes and failures.
- Once successfully deployed, we can click the gear icon next to the device name to see the effective policy on that device.
That’s it! We’ve now successfully deployed QoS to our environment.
Cisco DNA Center gives us the ability to easily customize, update, roll back changes, and undeploy our policies.
Learn more about Cisco DNA Center application QoS Policies here.
Find out more about Firefly here:
Firefly: