Cisco IQ Fundamentals: Activate Cisco IQ - session 2

Good morning, good afternoon, maybe good evening for some folks. Welcome to our expert insight series on activating.00:10Cisco IQ. This is the 1st step in realizing the unif the value of a unified AI powered digital experience that will transform how you manage, secure, and optimize your IT infrastructure.00:20We're fortunate today to have Jackie Cornellison. She's a business development lead and an IQ expert leading us today. Please use the Q and A at the bottom right. If you have questions during the session, just click on the Slido in the Q and A if we don't get a chance to answer all your questions, which we'll probably get, we'll probably have.00:32Enough time to answer them all. At the end of the session, there'll be a slide with a QR code to scan and that will take you to our community space and you can ask your question there. It's open for questions on Cisco IQ. So with that Jackie, the floor is yours.00:52Yeah, thank you Michelle. Hi, everyone, again, to reiterate, good afternoon, good morning, good evening, wherever you are in the world. Today personally I'm coming to you from San Jose California and we're gonna be going over Cisco IQ and what does that mean for you as a customer? And how can you be taking advantage of this.01:08For included resource that you now have available to you. So I'm gonna stop sharing my screen and we're just gonna hop right into it and let's get that screen up. So while I pull that up, a little bit about how we've gotten to Cisco IQ, might be thinking really Jackie another another platform, another interface. Well, idea is this is.01:27We're moving towards a single pane of glass, which is very exciting. Cisco IQ is going to be a part of that single pane of glass. So what Cisco IQ is, it's gonna be how you interact with Cisco from a support services standpoint. In summary, the digitization of your Cisco support.01:47So your Cisco support is how you access TAC, rmas, all of that fun stuff that helps support all of your products. Cisco IQ is available to you today at iQ.cisco.com. I will hold off creating your account till the end of this demo where we'll go over some key important steps to make sure you have as smoothest possible onboarding experience.02:02So again, just sit back, relax, enjoy the demo, we'll get into logging in at the end of the session. But for now.02:22Little bit more introduction on Cisco IQ. In the past, we've had the smart net platform, we've had CX cloud, and those have been your, you know, visibility into all of your assets and your investments with Cisco. We are now in like in an era post meet those where.02:29Threats are escalating at an exponential rate. With that, we acknowledge our customers need to always beyond. We need to have autonomy and agentic AI in places to make sure that you are constantly viewing the up to date information and you're remediating that information if not autonomously.02:46We could have just put an AI labor layer over our previous interfaces like CX cloud. However, it wouldn't be at the core of the interface itself. So that's why we move are moving towards Cisco IQ. Cisco IQ has a gentic AI and automation at its foundation and was built upon those principles to make sure that you are getting those AI insights. You are getting that autonomo.03:04Any where necessary. And you are getting those agentic features that can help you be more proactive with your infrastructure to help remediate some of the more advanced threats that are coming in this day of age. So that's the why we're moving to Cisco IQ. It did go live 24 April, so we are a few months in. We constantly are rolling out new features.03:24E.g., we did just have a major release at the end of July, which was very exciting, so a lot of exciting features to come in the next six months to a year. But instead of talking about what's coming, let's talk about what's already here. So once you log into Cisco IQ, again, please hold off on that until the end of the demo.03:42You'll see your home page. This is just the Cisco demo environment, so it's just our demo environment data, but if this was your account, you'd be able to see some onboarding steps like tell it sharing telemetry, getting your contracts uploaded, running your 1st query, et cetera. But.03:59Let's scroll down and actually look at what's available to you today. So again, this went general availability 24 April, we have three modules at the time of release. That's going to be the assets application. How do we look across the board in terms of your Cisco investments? Be able to have consolidated views of LDOS, contract information, et cetera.04:14Assessments, how do we look at proactive and reactive security? P certs, field notices, in addition to some new assessments we have that are really interesting that I will go over when we get to that part of the demo.04:34Finally, support. Support's gonna be where you're going to manage your TAC cases and rmas. You'll be able to open and manage TAC cases throughout Cisco IQ, which is great because it will also take the context of the device information from IQ and use that within the support case information.04:45Now I talked about that this is already available to you today. Cisco IQ is NO additional cost to you. It comes with your current support entitlement. Again, your support entitlements are what give you access to TAC, and some previous names for those would be smart net, solution support, success tracks. We've now actually consolidated our support offers.05:01To three tiers.05:20Basic, which would be what smart net was standard, which would be what solution support success tracks L one were, and signature would would be expert care and success tracks L two. So Cisco IQ is NO additional cost. It is linked to your support entitlement level, meaning the features you get access to in Cisco IQ are tied to your device by device.05:22Device level support. E.g., if you have mixed entitlement, only devices on standard will get the standard capabilities while the rest will be in basic if they fall on basic.05:42Now devices do not need to be on support to show up in Cisco IQ, but again, you do get more features as you go up our entitlement tiers. So when you're in IQ and your data is loaded, you'll be able to see how many assets you have under each tier and you'd be able to click here. It would bring you to our inventory tab where you then be able to see, ok.05:51Which assets fall under this tier of entitlement? Now let's talk about some of these features. So here we could see that if all features you get asset inventory, the ability to tag your assets for customized filtering, say by location or agency, end of life report, LDOS information as well as the ability to upload files.06:10As we see as you move up to standard or even signature, you start getting a lot more of those AI insights. You start getting pure benchmarking, how does your Cisco IQ instance look compared to your peers? Asset inventory insights, end of life, service coverage. We start going a bit more in depth and more granular with the information we're able to get to and generate via AI.06:29Bye.06:50You really see also the additional value of moving to standard and signature with the assessments feature. So assessments, if you're on basic, you get access to security advisories and field notices. But if you're on standard and signature, that's where you start getting our proactive assessments. Are you following Cisco's best practices? How can we make sure that your environment is being proactive in terms of.06:51You know, remediating potential security advisories before they happen. Support like I mentioned, you'll do the case management as well as self serve troubleshooting. And finally our resilient infrastructure service, which I will hold off on that until the end to go over that more in depth. But to start, let's go dive deep into our assets application.07:11So this is going to be your view of all of your assets. We look at both assets and sub components and both covered and uncovered assets. With that, this page is highly customizable in a user by user basis. You can have multiple users in Cisco IQ. Whoever creates the account will be the super user admin and they'll have the ability to add users either as a.07:33The viewer or as an admin.07:53So each viewer can customize this page for themselves. E.g., let's say security advisories mattered more to me than coverage. That's fine. I can move and drag and drop. If I save this, it's going to save my own custom view different from my peers. The other way I can make the information here relevant to me is via our filters.07:54Very easy to make a saved filter. Currently I don't have any, but if I had a saved filter I'd be able to select that, it would filter to my preset filter making it easier to, you know, see the stuff that's only relevant to me, make action actions quicker. But as we can see here, there's a plethora of filters to choose from, including product type. So e.g., product family.08:14Family say if your agency is split up by different product families, someone does, you know, works with the data center, someone works with the campus networking, they'd be able to only see the devices relevant to them. Coverage status.08:34Last signal date, this is a new filter we've added, and if we're talking about relevancy and making sure we're only seeing things that are currently active on the network, this is a great use case for that. How do we make sure you, you know, you're not just seeing clutter, you're only seeing the devices that are currently talking to Cisco. That's what last signal date measures is when was the last time that device opened the TAC case.08:46Case Telemetry was shared or the contract was renewed. This ensures that you're only seeing those relevant devices or you could do the reverse.09:06Who can I see the devices that aren't active? Next filter I'm gonna go over is data source, which then goes over how we ingest data in Cisco IQ. So one of the, there's a few main ways. One is going to be if you have a previous CX cloud instance, at the time of account creation, you'll be able to migrate that data over. And again, I'll go over that at the end.09:14The next way will be to manually upload your contracts manually or via a CSV file. Next will be using our current cloud controllers. So those that's Webex Intersight Meraki, so those since they are web based applications, you'll be able to connect via cloud and get that information in Cisco IQ.09:33The final way which provides the most granular information will be using the Cisco IQ link. Now this is the evolution of CSPC CX agent. It's our newest collector, and what this will do is a downloadable OVA file that sets up an on premise VM that will scan the network and get that more granular data we need to provide you with the most impactful insights. So that's data.09:51Including configuration, software versions. So those are the ways we can ingest data into Cisco IQ.10:11We'll be able to access that via the homepage here in system settings. We click there, we'll be able to see all of our different data connectors. Back to assets, we're now gonna hop into the inventory view. So this is going to be that massive list of all of your assets.10:17Like the overview page, this is highly customizable on a user by user basis. It's very easy to move around all of these different columns here. What I can also do is have my saved filters applied or I can even add more columns that are more applicable to me and my use cases.10:35If I don't have a lot of time, that's perfectly fine. Let's just take a look at the insights. What are maybe some areas I want to prioritize on based off of what Cisco's getting from my data? Maybe what should I look at in terms of telemetry? If I want to create this into a larger report, I can share with a leader, that's fine. I can create full analysis and it will generate that report for me.10:51Now let's take a look into an asset to see what's going on. So the asset view will show you everything about the asset from the product, identity, location. As you can see, we have that custom tag here that we're able to create, signals, telemetry, warranty, coverage. We can also go.11:12Product alerts, this is where we'll find if Cisco has released any notifications in regards to this particular product. We can see that there is six security advisories in a single field notice as well as hardware end of life has been announced for this product. Now what we could do from here is then go to our hardware, and this will show us if there's a hardware hierarchy that will show up.11:30Here, this one does not have one, but what we can see is the end of life milestone timeline. So in the end, we we know in the past our LDOS information has been slightly fragmented. Now for device specific information, you can get that entire timeline right here. So we can see everything from end of sale, end of software maintenance, end of service contract renewals.11:50To last day of support. If I'm curious about what one of these means.12:10Great, I can dropdown I get a description saying what does this mean for my particular environment? We can do the same thing for software end of life. We can see the last day of support for this device has already passed for this software version. That's something we may want to address. Now we do have 4000 assets here. It would take quite a while if I did ask.12:14Asset by asset trying to click in and find all that information, especially if we're doing an LDOS analysis. So what we're gonna do to show you how to simplify that process is going to do the ask AI right here.12:34Now some quick disclosures about our AI assistant. Our AI assistant does not use your data to train. It just uses your data to inference to help answer the question. The AI assistant is trained, say, on all of our TAC data, our product information, troubleshooting guides. Cisco is over 40 plus years of expertise and is trained on that data to help you.12:46Answer prompts surrounding case management. How do I summarize a case? How can I add an additional person? Troubleshooting, say you get a syslog message you don't understand. We can help you understand it here. Security advisories, what are potential workarounds for this potential security advisory I'm linked to?13:05What we're gonna do an example with is with assets. We're gonna say summarize assets past LDOS. So again, what this will do is right now it's looking at our demo environment, scanning our devices, and it's providing me with a high level summary of LDOS across my environment.13:22So here we can see, ok, the oldest device dates back to 28 February 2010I have some cleaning up I need to do. We can see total chassis 403, top three product families in addition to top location. If this is the info, if this is a summary of the information I need, perfect. I can download this as an Excel sheet, work from it from there.13:38But I could even take this a step further. Say if my key decision maker around LDOS.budget needs this report today. Great, I can analyze this response, what it's going to do is generate a high level report for me that I can then send off to that decision maker. It's gonna give me some key insights I'm gonna want to focus on, help me prioritize. In addition, give me some visu.13:57With key insights already tied to them. So again, taking out potentially a few days or weeks worth of analy analysis that potentially has had to be done in the past in regards to LDOS. So as we can see, we can see that there are NO assets.14:18We can see only twelve of our assets carry extended support coverage, so most of our assets once they reach LDOS are reaching LDOS. We can see again that oldest asset there, but then now we can look at chassis coverage, top three product families, chassis coverage status breakdown, and again, we already have all the key insights mentioned here.14:36So we have the highlighted things, we have the things we need to focus on, and this is now ready to go to download as a PDF to send to somebody or if I want this to be a reoccurring generated report, I could save this and it will save to my reports in the home page of Cisco IQ, and whenever I want to rerun it, I'll just click regenerate and it will regenerate it with the same query just with the update.14:55The data. If something here is not to your liking, that is perfectly fine. You can customize. So I can either free text prompt here or I can browse. I can en I can enrich, I can change different charts if say if I want a bar chart showing product families where total chassis is greater than 50.15:16If I want to change the focus, so I want to reframe the analysis to highlight product family concentration risk, or even text, I want this, I want this title rephrased, something along those lines. So that's how we can use the AI system to help us generate reports, especially around things that have potentially been teddious in the past like LDOS refreshing.15:33To wrap up assets, we're now gonna go into service contracts. Here you'll be able to view all of your contracts that are you are tied to. So we can see the support tier with the contracts, start and date, and the partner if one is associated. We click into the contract number, we will see information on building billing term and coverage.15:53As well as all of the assets that roll up into it. Before I hop to our next section, i'd love to show you real quick our dashboard function. So here we see our LDOS dashboard. And this actually was a project of our early field trial. So I mentioned IQ was still fairly young. With that engineering and product management wants to hear your suggestions.16:11In terms of what you want to see, and this was actually a by product of that during the early field trial. So what this is, it's looking at how do we consolidate your LDOS information so you can see it in a single view to help you make decisions around LDOS refreshing easier. So here again we see our total assets, but we also get that LDOS lookout, asset support coverage, asset replacement practi.16:31Authorities or even this one which I find super valuable, assets that are past LDOS and are currently vulnerable. So that's why we focus on LDOS. We want to make sure our products are supported. They're protected. But in this case, we have some assets that are not protected and have already accrued vulnerabilities.16:51Maybe that's one of a place we want to focus 1st on refreshing, and if we click on that intersection, we'll see here we have the filter set up to look for those devices. Now that wraps up assets. I'm next gonna go into the assessments application. And if you recalled from before, this is gonna be think of your proactive and reactive security.17:08Security. So if you are currently on the, if you're currently unsupported or on the basic tier, in this section, you get access to security advisories and field notices. Those are gonna be reactive support from Cisco. So Cisco sends out a notification about a product, you need to address it.17:28So there's this assessment overview here where we can view it in its holistic form or we can click security advisories and we can view advisory by advisory list. So this is going to list out all the security advisories that Cisco has sent out that you have either affected assets or potentially affected assets or listed the criticality as well as the last update.17:44What I'm going to do is click into one of these.18:04And right off the bat, it's gonna tell me a bit more about the assessment. What does this mean for me in my infrastructure, more about the severity, the published, the version. If I want to learn more about this, I can click to Cisco's website and it will give me the documentation for the specific advisory which gives me effective products, potential workarounds, all that information you'll need.18:07If we click into a device that has been affected, what we're going to see is different from the past, different from the past where we've had, say, our advisory being mapped more generically on a device level, we're now looking at your specific environment and mapping advisories to those. So e.g., here we have this particular device, it's important.18:27Like for this advisory. How do we know it's affected? Well, we can see it matched on software type, the software release and chassis product ID. In addition, we also for certain advisories, it will say matched on a configured feature.18:47So we're looking at your environment specific, your environment specifically to make sure we're mapping advisories to your specific environment rather than just to the generic product. So now we have the whole picture, we have the result details, information about the assessment, and information about the asset.18:59The information we need to draw conclusions on what actions we need to take. Again, you can click here to reach more information about this advisory on Cisco's website or you can also use the ask AI assistant. E.g., you can ask it for, you know, this specific device, what are potential workarounds? Are there any other affected products? So we can do some of that analysis and investigating within without even leaving Cisco ID.19:15Thank you.19:35Now field notices are gonna be the same except these are your non security related advisories. Again, those are available for non covered assets and basic. If you're on standard and signature tiers, you get access to our more in depth best practice assessments. And if security advisories and field notices are our.19:36Reactive support. Think about security hardening configuration, quantum safe, all of those assessments is proactive. They're taking cisco's best practices.19:56All of the documentation we have around the our best practice guides, generating those into checklists and then cross referencing that checklist against your configurations to see, are you following cisco's best practices or are you not? And how can you potentially switch configurations in order to do so to prevent advisories from happening in the future?20:05And again, we have different assessments that help mitigate different issues. E.g., configuration will look at deviations across the network, our infrastructure that may affect availability, security or performance, meanwhile, security hardening will look across the infrastructure for deviations that might affect security posture or risk exposure.20:22So we're actually gonna pull an example from security hardening today. And again, this is taking information. This is run on Cisco's OS hardening guide. I'm not sure if you've ever seen that guide, but it's a very long list of all of cisco's best practice guidance to help harden your security posture. So what we've done now instead of you having to manually look at that document and manually.20:41Cross reference it with your infrastructure. We've done that for you in this assessment. And we've actually flagged devices.21:01That have followed our best practices or have not followed our best practice. So let's go to assets that have not passed. E.g., we could see that for this one it's a medium severity. We have 458 assets that have not passed this assessment.21:07If we click in, what we can see is what does this assessment actually measure? So it checks whether iOS XE device is configured to avoid sending syslog message to the console, et cetera. If I want to read more about the rule, I can click this here, it'll bring me to Cisco's website.21:24What I can do now is same thing I did with field advisories earlier is I can click on this particular asset and it's gonna show me the finding details. How do we know that this device does not have this best practice set up? If it's in the configuration, it will give us that, but here we can just see right now.21:39The finding details. We found in your configuration the console syslog syslog logging is not explicitly disabled, so we now know, ok, you're not following cisco's best practice. I can then send this over to my network engineer, say this needs to be fixed for this device. We found out it's important for us to do so in order to help mitigate XYZ risk.21:57And then at the same time, with our recommendations, so if you're, that's for standard, if you're on signature, we actually give you the suggested actions to take in order to help remediate the issue. So in this case, we have the.22:15AI generated suggested actions we can copy and paste over to our control pane to be able to remediate this issue on the spot. So that's going to be what you get with standard, the finding details, what you get where the recommendation is with signature you get the ability to have those suggested actions already made for you.22:33So configuration assessment's gonna be the same thing, same thing with the quantum safe infrastructure except this one's looking at readiness for the quantum area era. We also have software release conformance, so are you following Cisco's ideal software versions as well as certificate expiration? So again, just to reiterate security.22:52Advisories and field notices are available for unsupported devices and basic. Meanwhile, standard and signature give you access to the more proactive assessments.23:12We're finally gonna wrap up with support before we head into some other things. This is gonna be where you can manage your TAC cases. So we can see here case pending, rma's pending, RMA drafts, a holistic overview of what's going on in terms of our case management.23:24If we go into a particular case, we can start to see all the information in regards to it, which always takes a second to load, but as you can see, we can also open a case within Cisco IQ. Like I showed you before in the Ask AI assistant, we can use that to help us add members to a case, get product information to add to a case, add notes, et cetera.23:41So if I click into one, not sure if I have access to any cases, but you'd be able to see all the notes, the information that are applied to that certain case. Same thing with rmas, you'll be able to show any rmas that are associated with the particular account you're on.24:01Which likes to take its time today, but for the sake of time I'll move on. So we're back home. Something I want to show now is the resilient infrastructure playbook, and this is, I mentioned we're rolling things out in large releases. This was part of our July release. And what this is, it's a playbook to help you in the post missose era. So right now, again, I talked to.24:25How those.24:45Really advanced AI threats that are coming to play right now. We need to make sure our customers have the right infrastructure. They're being up to date and proactive with how they set up their infrastructure to make sure it's protected and advisories are mitigated. So how do we do that? We do that with the AI readiness plan. So this is taking information we've already gathered within Cisco.24:46BYQ and it's just consolidating and organizing it in a way that helps you be more proactive with this AI readiness. So 1st step map the attack surface, how can we look across the board in terms of your telemetry status, your coverage to make sure things are covered correctly and are protected?25:06Next would be how do we remediate certain issues that have already occurred? How can we automate certain software updates? How can we make sure that you're taking action as quickly as possible to make sure that, you know, your devices are secure and more advisories can't happen in the future?25:23Finally modernizing legacy systems. How do we make sure that your systems are up to date so they're able to be more secure? Now this is starting at the, you have access to the playbook at any level, but to in order to get more of these in more in depth insights and the autonomous software upgrades, you do need to be on standard or signature level.25:39That's all I'm going to show today in terms of the actual demo. What we can do now is we can actually go back to our presentation and we can walk through some onboarding steps to get you set up today. So like I mentioned, you should have access today.IQ.cisco.com. If you go to iQ.cisco.com today.25:59And hit login with SSO, you should be able to create an account. Now there are some issues you may face if you are using a Gmail account or a public domain account, you may not be able to create one. You will need to do it with your company account. At the same time.26:18Provide another point if someone wants to unmute and remember the other mitigations we've reached. But make sure again you are using your company account and you have the right level of access within your CC your cisco ID to be able to create that account. Next up is gonna be to create your account. So you're gonna select your primary storage region.26:34For where you are located, whether that's US, EMEA or APJC, and you're also going to enter your preferred name for your organization's Cisco IQ account.26:54The next step is going to be to mitigate any Cisco CS cloud data you've had in the past. It's very important you do this step now because it is, it is hard to do and it's hard to get that data once we have created your account. So if you have current CX cloud data, you want mitigated over, migrated over, make sure you do that now.27:06No, so you're gonna select any accounts that you currently have to migrate over.27:26And you're gonna be able to migrate that over. And again, now you have all the information in regards to your account to migrate, the account name and where you're storing your data. You'll create your account and migrate that over. Now.27:31We are going to wrap up our session, but if there's any additional questions or you want to learn how to upgrade your service support to standard or signature, you can contact your account team. You can additionally submit any questions in our communities, ask me anything through Monday 30 31 August. You can scan that QR code there to get that.27:47In addition, if you are say not in your renewal time and you would like access say to the resilient infrastructure playbook, or the other standard capabilities, ask your account team about our quick start SKU to help get you those features before you have the time to renew into a higher support tier.28:06No, Michelle I'm gonna pass it back to you if there's anything else we need to cover. There isn't Jackie, but thank you very much. Thanks everybody for joining and have a great day.28:23