Blog

Catalyst Center shows your infrastructure is healthy while the user still cannot load Salesforce. ThousandEyes closes that gap. Here is what the integration actually solves, how it works, and where it fits in a Cisco shop.

After years of real-world SD-Access deployments, the honest answer is: it depends. A practical, checklist-driven reality check on whether Cisco SD-Access is worth the effort in brownfield campus networks in 2026.

Backup, restore, and upgrade on the Cisco C9800 look simple until they are not. A full lifecycle walkthrough with Install mode, ISSU, SMU, N+1 rolling upgrades, and the gotchas that never fit on a GUI tooltip.

In an SD-Access fabric, the Cisco C9800 stops being the wireless data-plane anchor. Client traffic rides the VXLAN overlay from fabric-enabled AP to edge switch. Here is how fabric-mode wireless actually works and why you would adopt it.

Local mode and FlexConnect are the two fundamental ways a C9800 hands off client traffic, and the wrong choice shapes WAN use, failure behavior, VLANs, ACLs, and AAA. A per-site decision framework for wireless designers.

RF punishes shortcuts. Bad AP count, wrong channel plan, or a misjudged power envelope will haunt a wireless design for years. A practical Cisco C9800 RF design guide covering site survey, channel planning, and 2.4, 5, and 6 GHz power tuning.