Starting with this release, Cisco Crosswork Change Automation permits automatic execution of Change Automation Playbooks triggered via alerts generated by linked Health Insights KPIs. For details, see the topic "Link KPIs to Playbooks and Run Them Automatically" in the Cisco Crosswork Change Automation and Health Insights 5.0 User Guide.

Starting with this release, Cisco Crosswork Health Insights enables users to link a Health Insights Key Performance Indicator (KPI) to one or more Change Automation Playbooks, and have those Playbooks automatically remediate network problems based on alerts generated by the linked KPI. For details, see the topic "Link KPIs to Playbooks and Run Them Automatically" in the Cisco Crosswork Change Automation and Health Insights 5.0 User Guide.

For information on how to use Cisco Crosswork Change Automation, see the chapter Automate Network Changes in the Cisco Crosswork Change Automation and Health Insights 5.0 User Guide.

For information about using flexible Playbook development tools, see the Writing Custom Playbooks tutorial in the Cisco Crosswork Network Automation Developer Guides on Cisco DevNet.

For information on how to use Cisco Crosswork Health Insights, see the chapter Monitor Network Health and KPIs in the Cisco Crosswork Change Automation and Health Insights 5.0 User Guide.

• Group the KPIs within a KPI Profile for monitoring relevant device metrics. For best results, limit to 10 KPIs per KPI Profile. Maximum number of KPIs that can be supported within a KPI profile is 50.

  The KPIs vary in the amount of data they collect. Although the system allows for up to 50 KPIs/KPI profiles, care must be taken to ensure that you have both license and Crosswork Data Gateway capacity in place before deploying the KPIs. For more information, see the topic Enable KPI Profiles on Devices in the Cisco Crosswork Change Automation and Health Insights 5.0 User Guide.

• For optimal performance, enable a KPI Profile in batches of no more than 100 devices.

  When you are enabling KPI profiles on devices, ensure that sufficient capacity is available on Cisco Crosswork Data Gateway. If sufficient capacity is not available, it may cause overload and outage. For more information, see the the topic Enable KPI Profiles on Devices in the Cisco Crosswork Change Automation and Health Insights 5.0 User Guide.

• For best system performance, use the default KPI cadence.

  KPI cadence is set based on the nature of the KPI. Any decisions about using a lower cadence (for example, as low as 10 seconds) should be reviewed with Cisco Professional Services.

• Playbook run fails with "access error" messages indicating failure "to set device override credentials in NSO". To avoid this, ensure that "admin" is a member of the ncsadmin user group in Cisco NSO.

• Sometimes, under certain load conditions, the execution of a Playbook times out.

  • If it continues to fail, try changing the time out for the job.

  • If it fails because of the device being locked, try changing the device state to DOWN and UP again.

• While scheduling playbooks across a dynamic group tag, the corresponding job set screen for the job in the Job History page will not display the relevant devices, until the job is scheduled for execution.

• Running a Playbook on multiple devices at the same time with different collection_type parameter values may result in failure. Re-executing the failed Playbook will resolve the issue.

• With SWIM APIs, when you execute the remove flow, it deactivates the image and then removes it.

• If you apply to a device a KPI profile that has alerting disabled for all of the KPIs in the profile, alerts still may be sent. This can happen if the KPI profile's ID shares a substring with other KPI profile IDs that have alerting enabled. For example: In a set of three KPI profiles with the IDs "L2", "L2SNMP" and "L2GRPC", all three profiles IDs contain the substring "L2". To avoid this problem, ensure that KPI profile names are unique and do not share substrings with other KPI profiles.

• Operation timeouts can occur when adding a new KPI to an existing and enabled KPI Profile and then editing the newly added KPI. Write times for KPI edits can take up to five minutes, so the edited KPI in the profile will be enabled eventually. If you find the timeout message a problem, you may want to disable the KPI profile until the write delay has passed, as suggested in the following item.

• After a KPI Profile is enabled, editing the cadence and threshold parameter for any of the associated KPIs can be achieved using one of the three methods below:

  • Create a custom KPI with the required cadence and threshold parameters and associate it with the existing KPI Profile.

  • Create a new KPI Profile with the relevant KPIs associated. Update the cadence and alert parameters before enabling this new KPI Profile.

  • Disable the KPI Profile and perform the modifications on the relevant associated KPIs. Then re-enable the KPI Profile.

• For custom KPIs:

  • While creating a custom KPI that makes direct use of APIs, you must select the full sensor path to the leaf sensors (not a partial sensor path) up to a certain hierarchy (gather path).

  • All leaf sensor paths are reserved for that KPI's use only.

  • For more information on custom KPIs, see the chapter "Monitor Network Health and KPIs" in the Crosswork Change Automation and Health Insights User Guide.