Cisco Live is the network industry’s largest event, bringing together over 28,000 attendees in the U.S. and 17,000 in Europe. For one week it provides training, new product announcements, onsite labs, certification testing, keynotes, partner product showcases, and entertainment.

The event requires over 2,300 wireless access points, 650 network switches, dual 100 Gigabit per second Internet links, and a mobile containerized data center to serve the event. The Network Operations Center team uses Cisco’s commercial management products alongside open source solutions, including Grafana, to collect network statistics and display interesting metrics about the conference. A large video display wall shows a rotating set of dashboards with event statistics — performance, consumption, device count, availability, and latency measurements.

Join us as Cisco Distinguished Engineer and NOC operations lead Jason Davis discusses how they plan for such a large deployment and set it up in a compressed timeline. You’ll hear how Grafana plays a significant role in visualizing telemetry and instrumentation across network, wireless, compute, storage, and attendee metrics. In order to set up a network of this size with only a few days before attendees show up, you must depend on “brutal automation” — data observability is key. You may pick up a few tips, especially if you are a NetDevOps, SRE type!