The second part of the guide “How to upgrade your Catalyst Center :)” relate to validation tool. There are 2 different tools, depending on you starting version, GUI validation tool (recent version) or CLI Aura tool (older version).

Aura tool

Aura tool is a CLI tool that allow you to run many validation task inside your maglev shell and provide you a report in PDF file format. This report show you all the test ran and provide you the result of every check, indicating what kind of error is present:

Detailed information about how to use Aura tool is here: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/cloud-systems-management/dna-center/215840-cisco-dna-center-aura-audit-and-upgrad.html

This report helps the Cisco TAC engineer, activated by a service request, to validate your sytem upgrade or fix the issues. After that, the Cisco TAC can give you the green light to proceed futher!

Take note that you can freely run the Aura tool until version 2.2!

Validation tool

Since version 2.3.3 Cisco lock the maglev shell (You can run maglev command only if you receive a valid token from Cisco TAC) and introduce GUI validation tool inside the Catalyst Center web ui.

You can run the validation tool from System Health menù and then select the appropriate tool:

Add a new task and select all the components you want to validate:

After that you can consult the report and export it:

I suggest, also in this case, to contact the Cisco TAC and provide them the report for deep analysis and validation.

All the details about validation tool can be found here: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/cloud-systems-management/dna-center/220621-validate-cisco-dna-center-upgrade-readin.html