DNA Center Assurance Practice Questions

Answers and explanations appear when you work through the set above.

1. Which core telemetry metric does Cisco DNA Center Assurance aggregate to generate the Health Scores (on a 1 to 10 scale) it assigns to network devices and clients?

   • Inventory data such as chassis serial numbers and installed module part numbers
   • KPIs such as reachability, CPU and memory use, link errors, and onboarding times
   • Running-configuration length and the number of changes since the last backup
   • Smart Licensing tier and days remaining on each device subscription

2. Which troubleshooting feature in Cisco DNA Center maps the step-by-step physical and virtual path taken by packets between two IP endpoints, displaying per-hop performance metrics and applied ACL checks?

   • Command Runner
   • Path Trace
   • Device Sensor
   • Network Reasoner

3. In Cisco Catalyst Center (formerly DNA Center), what role does the AI Network Analytics platform perform?

   • Automatically writes Ansible playbooks that push a baseline configuration to every access switch.
   • Uses cloud machine learning to baseline the network, flag anomalies, and cut alert noise.
   • Offloads TCAM forwarding lookups from access switches to the Catalyst Center appliance.
   • Provisions eBGP peerings to public cloud providers from the learned traffic baselines.

4. Which factors are calculated by Cisco Catalyst Center Assurance to generate a Client Health Score for connected wireless endpoints?

   • Whether onboarding succeeded, plus RF connectivity quality (RSSI and SNR).
   • The client operating system patch level and the age of its antivirus signature set.
   • The serial number and PoE power draw of the access switch the AP connects to.
   • The response time of the Intent API and the size of the JSON payloads it returns.

5. Which capabilities are provided by the Path Trace diagnostic tool built into Cisco Catalyst Center (DNA Center)?

   • Generates patch panel recabling instructions so the physical path matches the logical design.
   • Shows the hop-by-hop path between two endpoints with interface stats, ACL analysis, and QoS.
   • Decrypts TLS 1.3 flows along the path so each hop can apply deep packet inspection.
   • Detects err-disabled ports along the path and re-enables them with a shutdown and no shutdown.

6. What is the purpose of the Client 360 view in Cisco Catalyst Center Assurance?

   • It gives one client's health, onboarding events, RF stats, and history in a single view.
   • It displays a 360 degree floor plan of every access point and switch rack in the site.
   • It pushes a per-client QoS and VRF policy to every switch the client has roamed across.
   • It builds a bill of materials of all client hardware for refresh and warranty planning.

7. Which Catalyst Center Assurance capability proactively simulates real client behavior (association, DHCP, authentication) at scheduled intervals to detect wireless issues before real users report them?

   • Sensor tests (dedicated or AP-based sensors)
   • Path Trace between two client IP addresses
   • Command Runner with scheduled show commands
   • Intelligent Capture of live client packets

8. In Catalyst Center Assurance, what typically happens when a managed device's KPIs (for example CPU or link errors) cross an issue threshold?

   • The device is factory reset and then re-provisioned through Plug and Play.
   • An Assurance issue is raised showing the device and the KPIs behind it.
   • The device is removed from inventory until its health score recovers.
   • Its uplinks are shut down so the fault cannot spread to the rest of the site.

9. What underlying data collection mechanisms does Catalyst Center Assurance rely on to gather the telemetry used for health scoring and issue detection?

   • Show commands that administrators paste into the web console after each incident.
   • SNMP, streaming telemetry, syslog, NetFlow, and device APIs, collected continuously.
   • A nightly FTP backup of each running configuration, compared with the previous night.
   • CAPWAP tunnel statistics exported by the wireless controllers and nothing else.

10. Which Catalyst Center feature allows an administrator to issue read-only show commands to multiple managed devices simultaneously through a single web console session?

    • Command Runner
    • Template Editor
    • Path Trace
    • Network Hierarchy

11. What does the Overall Health dashboard summarize at the top level of Catalyst Center Assurance?

    • CPU, memory, and disk use of the Catalyst Center cluster nodes and their services.
    • Network device, client, and application health rolled up across the site hierarchy.
    • License expiration dates for every Cisco DNA subscription across all virtual accounts.
    • Temperature and power readings from the environmental sensors in each wiring closet.

12. How does AI Network Analytics reduce alert fatigue compared to fixed, manually configured static thresholds?

    • It suppresses every alert below P1 until an administrator acknowledges the P1 issues.
    • It learns a baseline for each network and flags deviations from that normal.
    • It asks each administrator to retune the static thresholds weekly from a guided wizard.
    • It analyzes only traffic mirrored to it by a third-party packet broker in the data center.

13. In Catalyst Center Assurance, what onboarding stages are typically broken out individually when diagnosing why a wireless client failed to connect?

    • The final ping to the default gateway, reported as a single pass or fail result.
    • Association, authentication, DHCP, and DNS, each tracked as its own stage.
    • AP uptime, controller software version, and the AP's last reboot reason code.
    • Switch port speed, duplex, and PoE class negotiated by the client's access point.

14. What is the benefit of Catalyst Center's Issues dashboard prioritizing alerts by severity (P1 through P4) rather than presenting them chronologically?

    • Operators tackle the highest-impact problems first instead of reading every event in time order.
    • Priorities apply to licensing and subscription alerts, keeping them apart from device faults.
    • P4 issues are closed automatically after 24 hours, so they never need an operator to resolve them.
    • It turns off issue correlation, so each raw syslog message is listed as a separate issue to review.

15. Which comparison correctly distinguishes Path Trace from a manual traceroute run from the CLI?

    • Path Trace is run from a router's CLI and returns the same hop list and round-trip times.
    • Path Trace adds interface stats, QoS, and ACL results to each hop of the path it discovers.
    • Traceroute reports the ACL matched at each hop, while Path Trace reports only hop addresses.
    • Path Trace needs BGP on the destination device so it can read the AS path for each hop.