Cisco IQ Fundamentals - Data Connectors

So now let's talk about getting data into Cisco IQ. So if you go to the system settings and the data connectors page, you see the screen and you can see that there's a list of our cloud collectors as well as our legacy collectors and also some information around IQ link, which I'll talk through in a second. So starting with our cloud connectors, these are our controllers that are accessible on the public internet.00:04In that, this would be a SAS to SAS connection for the SaaS IQ instance into these. For these, you're just an API key away. You click the gear icon in settings, you put your API key in or for accounts for these collectors, and then the data from these collectors will start flowing through into Cisco IQ.00:24As you can see here on this account, we've actually onboarded several instances in a couple of these controllers. So for instance, Intersight and SD WAN manager, formerly V managed, we've onboarded five organizations. Each organization has its own.00:41API key, so then all of those organizations come in. You might onboard multiple API keys depending on how many organizations you are in within these controllers. But we support the integration with Cisco intersight. We support integration with Webex through control hub. So that's gonna get you your ability to get some of your endpoints that are registered to things like Webex calling, like roomos device.00:57Devices and things like that. The inter site controller, it gets you your your data center, your compute information.01:17Also have Catalyst SD WAN manager, so that was formerly called vmanage, so that's how you're gonna get your SD WAN devices that are managed to that controller in. And then finally, we've got Meraki, which controls your wireless and your IoT device portfolio as well.01:23Now, you might also have some controllers that live on your premise that aren't available through cloud to cloud connections or aren't accessible through the public internet. Catalyst Center is the main example of that, so you can see down here, we do support Catalyst Center, but because that lives on your premise, we need to proxy the connection into your environment so that we can talk to your Catalyst Center and.01:38Get the devices that Catalyst Center is controlling. The way we do that is through an appliance called Cisco IQ link. We'll talk about that more in a second, but IQ Link is what's going to be a virtual appliance or a virtual machine that's going to proxy the connectivity from the cloud now into your network and have the ability to go talk to Catalyst Center and go get that information back into Cisco IQ.01:58The cool thing with Cisco IQ Link is it not only supports Catalyst Center, but it also supports direct connectivity to devices as you see mentioned here. So this is a really distinct advantage of Cisco IQ and IQ link together is that you might have some devices in your network that are not managed by controllers, and that frankly, you might have NO plans of ever having managed.02:18Used by controller for various reasons. For those types of devices, we can still use IQ link to be able to communicate with those devices so we can go grab information around that device's software version, the configuration that's running, as well as run commands as needed to those devices and get and parse that output back.02:38So IQ Link brokers that under the hood, it's using cx's radkit capability. So if you've been engaging with TAC or talking with TAC about Radkit or maybe you've gone to Cisco Live and seen some of the presentations about radkit, it's that same code that's supporting some of the capabilities for IQ Link under the hood on how we go talk to devices. So a very nice structured way that's the tech.02:56Supported by pyats and Genie under the hood so that we communicate with devices through API calls and SSH but in a structured format to go get that data back into Cisco IQ so we can have that available for our intelligence.03:17I'll be doing a specific video on setting up IQ Link and adding direct device into Cisco IQ Link so that you can see that process in another video. Now finally, you might have already onboarded devices into a prior product such as CX Cloud or maybe you've got a professional services agreement and you've already got CSPC deployed in your environment.03:29If you know what these are, you've heard of these, you know that these are available in your environment, then you can use these to get data into your environment as well. You don't have to re onboard devices.03:49The way we do this is we're tunneling these through a CX cloud account. So if you already have CX cloud with the CX agent, when you register your account, it's gonna identify that you're a CX cloud customer and you say yes to migrating your data, and then it's gonna pull in the information from these controllers and from CX Cloud across. If you've got CSPC, but you're not a CX cloud.03:59Customer, you will have to enroll with the CX cloud account in order to get data from CSPC as it stands today. So the process there would be to open a TAC case.04:19Request that you get a CX Cloud account added because you're onboarding into IQ and you want your CSBC data to come across. So set another way. We are not supporting direct connectivity from CSBC or CX agent directly into IQ, that data needs to go through an existing CX cloud account, and then we tunnel that data from CX cloud and CX cloud's API over it.04:28Into IQ.04:48At some point in the future, IQ Link will be the prime sole collector and then we will sunset the CX agent and CSBC capabilities, but we especially need to make sure that we've got feature parity between IQ Link and CSBC before we do that because our professional services business relies on a lot of analytics and reports that come out of CSPC.04:49