Catalyst Center Assurance - Basics

Welcome to today's session on Catalyst Center Assurance Essentials.00:12So today we have another presenter with me, I'll also be presenting. Can you go to the next slide? Yeah, so along with me I have so is a customer success specialist on Cisco Enterprise Networking team.00:17Primarily working with SD WAN and catalyst center. She brings over twelve years of experience in enterprise networking with a strong focus on wireless and SD WAN technologies. In her previous roles, she has served as a senior tech engineer at other vendors.00:37Providing support to customers across various sectors. And about me, I am also a customer success specialist focused on enterprise networking, currently working on Cisco catalyst center, Meraki and Cisco IQ. I am a certified associate and network associate with team interest in networking and.00:53And.01:13And to have a smooth meeting, we do have few things to mention before the meeting. So during the meeting, if you have any questions, please put your questions in the chat or Q and A panel which will be opening in a minute and that you can find in the app section in the Slido.01:14So you can put any questions that you might have about today's session on there or else on the chat as well. And if you would like to if there are any audio issues or screen issues, please let us know through chat and we will.01:33We we will try to help you as much as possible and for any unanswered questions, I mean during the session our panelists will be answering the questions but for any unanswered questions we will be having the Q and A at the end of the session with our presenters.01:49And, maybe if let's say if the session goes after 11:00, please bear with us and with that, let me start this session and we'll go to the next.02:05So before we start the session, next, yeah, we would like to know if you have onboarded on Cisco IT. So you might, if you have not heard about it, we would like to give you a little glimpse about it.02:20So, next slide. Yeah. Cisco IT. Now we have lot of Cisco documentation and we have lot of data coming from your network infrastructure as you're managing your network infrastructure. There is a lot of data coming every single day.02:35But this data alone isn't enough and in the same time documentation alone isn't enough. What we thought is why we combine these two and create some intelligence here, and that is where this comes in.02:52So now Cisco IQ is a digital interface which helps you turn your network data into clear actionable insights. And all these insights are personalized to your particular network infrastructure. So all the recommendations that you would be getting from Cisco it.03:08You are personalized to your network. Instead of just giving you best practices, this tool will giving you the personalized recommendations according to your network infrastructure. And now you might be wondering, do I have to always go to Cisco IQ and check if these insights are updated? No.03:28So Cisco IT will be do sharing these insights proactively to the customers to optimize their infrastructure. And at the same time it will be all these insights are predictive. So e.g., let's see there are like 90 hundred 9300 switches in your network and.03:48All are running on a specific infrastructure, on a specific version, and that version is gonna go end of support, maybe in next three months.04:08Maybe you might not be aware of this because most of the time we are working on some of the other issue troubleshooting them and we might miss this particular milestone. So in that case, Cisco IT it will proactively generate this insights telling you that, ok, this particular 9300 switches.04:17Are gonna go LDOS for the software in next three months and if you're not gonna upgrade these, you might not have support from the Cisco side. So in this way all these insights are personalized, proactive, and predictive for your specific infrastructure.04:36So that is a very brief about Cisco IQ and now to we will go to our actual session and for that I would like to call over to you Padma. Thank you for the brief introduction. Good morning, good day to everyone, wherever you're joining from.04:52So today's sessions, today's session is completely about assurance, catalyst center assurance, how assurance works or what is the technology behind assurance, what's the benefit of it? How do we use to best troubleshooting all about assurance?05:10So with that, a quick introduction about assurance and its workflow. So yes. What is assurance and this very slide is giving you a summary or is gonna summarize and tell you how careless it.05:25Center, not just for the automation part, how it is designed to improve the operation across four major areas in your network. The 1st is visibility, second is your automation. 3rd is security and the final is insight. Now these are the four key factors that would judge and.05:42Help you how a network is operating and how easily it is being monitored.06:02Having said that, coming to the visibility part, assurance here, the catalyst centers simplifies the network operation by improving the visibility, which means you can't generally troubleshoot what you can't see, but when you're using assurance.06:07This is going to create a visibility in a deep visibility into every corner of your network, which is going to give you a deep insight on every single device and with by using your automation, this is gonna help you reduce the repetitive operational work while maintaining consistency.06:22And in terms of security, catalyst into specific assurance when integrated with technology like ICE helps you to strengthen the endpoint visibility and the policy enforcement. There are various changes or improvisations that you can do in the policy with the insights that will be provi.06:41Provided.07:01By technologies like ICE when it is integrated with the center. And finally, insights using the AI driven analytics to identify the issue faster and it recommends the remediation also. So this is one key factor for whoever is monitoring or managing the network to find out where exactly the issues happen.07:02What is causing the issue and how this can be resolved. So all of this go hand in hand and this is going to help you improvise and improvise and better maintaining and monitoring of your network and all of this like there can be a question asking like if all of this can be achieved, what is the baseline?07:22Telemetry primary key factor here is telemetry. Telemetry plays a major role where all of this information which is collected from every part of your network through the telemetry is given to the catalyst center where it does create an insight and through the automation.07:40The, so it all goes hand in hand. Telemetry improves the insight of your network. Through the insight it it improves the future automation and the automation feeds the assurance, assurance validates if the automation is correct. So final data that you see on your assurance dashboard is going to so many level of process.07:57And it is carefully curated to tell you what is causing the issue and what could be the relevant cause and how can you fix this. So that's a basic overview as to what assurance can do when brought into your network. What are the underlying technology that sits behind assurance and how the final.08:15What is derived is that?08:35So, it's, it's a lot of lots and lots of telemetry, that's what I would say. Catalyst Center continually continuously collects the information from the numerous source across your network. Now, having said numerous source, that includes your SNMP, your netflow, your DHCP DNS, your wireless controllers, your application telemetry, and my.08:36Instead of analyzing each source independently, it creates what's it? Catalyst under creates and correlates all these datas which is collected from every corner of your network. It puts together and correlates each data to find out.08:57How is your base network operation looks like and what is the deviation that's happening? And it correlates each incident with one another and find out the relevance as to what could be causing the issue. Now this if it had to be done manually through.09:12Through a human, like when we are managing the network, it's gonna take you an enormous amount of time to collect all the logs collecting from each and every corner, finding out the relevance, looking into the timestamp as to when did the client connect and when did the client drop, what was the time in between it if the key exchange was happening.09:28So in short, all of this work is gonna happen in the back end and the baseline of your network, how it basically operates is going to be created. From where you will be able to see any kind of deviation that will be highlighted. So that would make the job of finding out the root cause much more easier.09:45And it just doesn't happen with the catalyst center alone. There's a machine learning algorithm which runs in the background, which helps in establish the normal behavior of your environment with the deviations that they see.10:02How it works, how does the outline of it looks like? Here's a picture that you see on the screen. So what you see here at the bottom is your traditional network or your office environment, you see you have your switches, your controllers, your catalyst center. You, you see all of it here.10:18And then all this information is being sent to the Cisco catalyst center, and from the catalyst center, we have different namespace that you can see on the next level and these different namespace holds a very different responsibility.10:36So what we are going to focus now is the assurance or the network data plane, if you can see my cursor moving here. So all of this information which is collected from your network is being sent to the catalyst center and anything that's related to the assurance.10:50Is going to be consumed by the data network data platform name space that you see here. So whether it is GRPC information and SNMP netflow, a syslog, all of this information is going to be consumed by the network data plane.11:06Network data platform. Now, once we get this information, it is going to be processed. There are two engines as you can see that will process the data, the on prem engine and that's the one that you see on the right. You can see that it has cloud based machine learning engine.11:24So that if there's mainly anything related to the wireless, you enable this engine and it will be sent to cloud based it will be sent to the cloud based environment where this data would go through a level of processing, keeping that in mind, the personal information such retried from the network such as your IP address and the client information would be.11:42Encrypted and will not be in a readable format. Only those information which is relevant to finding out the issue would be shared.12:02Would go through a level of processing and it will be sent back or it will be fed back into your catalyst center and from there on where you see it populating on your assurance dashboard. So that's how the data processing happens on or this is the.12:09The work that happens behind the data that you see on your network. So while all of this is happening, the information that's taken out from your network is fed into the catalyst center. Who plays the primary role is the streaming telemetry? What difference does the streaming telemetry?12:24Creates from the legacy SNMP or the other data method. So, a quick comparison like in case of SNMP, what you see in the screen it says that that use a pull based data import method causes an overhead to the controller.12:41To give you a quick example on that front, there are two scenarios in case of using an SNMP, what it does generally is that you, you enable an SNMP, it pulls the device and it tries to understand if there's any timely update, if there's any timely data.12:57It has to pull the device, get a whole lot of information, find out, sends it either as an alert or a warning or however you configure it. Now, every time this olds and fetches a large amount of data is will definitely cause overhead to the.13:13Controller whatever device is being enabled, but wherein in the streaming telemetry, what you use is called as push based data export method, which means you have the privilege to configure what information that you'd like to see and how quick you would like to be.13:28Highlighted or notified with that, which means you can create a certain level of KPI or an events which you would like to be notified and once the issue occurs, notification sent second after the change or the instant has taken effect, which means you have clearly configuring what you wanted to see and you see only.13:44With that information with a higher priority being set.14:04In that scenario, so it's with as the configuration is already done, it will be the device by itself will be pushing the information. So here there is NO place for full based method which would be sending a bunch of logs and creating an overhead to the controller. So using the streaming telemetry, the process of fetching the information is being very much simplified where you create.14:07Separate set of KPIs and you see only that information which is very relevant to your network or whatever you'd like to see on your network being highlighted.14:28Without NO delay. You don't have to wait for the time that the polling has to happen and the information gets delayed few seconds later now. The moment it happens, you get it notified on your assurance dashboard and it reduces the delay and it makes a process of managing and identifying any.14:36Issue as early as possible. That by itself makes a significant difference from the previous method to the current one that we have. We'll quickly look into the prerequisites. So prerequisites that we have here is quite simple.14:52We'll have to ensure that all the devices that we are planning to look this information for should be either managed or monitored in the catalyst center and ensure that all the devices are running on the recommended version. There are certain level of version in which these informations are collected and processed better.15:07Or we call it a golden version or a recommended version. We recommend being your your device running on that specific version and ensure that the necessary connectivity between the device and the catalyst center is properly established. The last part is the integration with ICE.15:25It is optional, but I would say it gives you or it brings you in a lot of additional benefits in terms of significantly identifying the endpoint visibility specifically would be an added advantage, but still it's optional based on how each network operates.15:42So enable and review the device. So when you have to or when you wanted to enable, when we say enable, right? It basically is misunderstood. The device controllability is often misunderstood, so I like to quickly clarify when enabled the catalyst center is allowed to push certain information.15:59Certain configurations to the managed devices that enables the telemetry collection and creates the operational visibility. Without these configuration, the catalyst center loses access to some of the information that is required for assurance to operate at its best.16:20That doesn't necessarily mean that the platform stops working. It simply means that some operational insights become unavailable. A recent catalyst center release also provides more flexibility. E.g., administrators can choose whether the IP device tracking should be enabled while still allowing other telemetry related.16:36Informations to be applied. This gives customers a greater control for whoever is using it, gives you a greater control as to how to adopt assurance and how your network completely operates. With prerequisites, let's walk through the deployment process real quick.16:56How how how it is being deployed, what it takes to have the catalyst center deployed. So exactly as I mentioned in the previous slide, the process is pretty simple. Ensure that you have a good connectivity or a good reachability between your device to the catalyst center. Ensure that the device is in the inventory and the device should be.17:15U.17:35Assigned to a specific site, ok? That's, that's the primary C it is not required that the device is provisioned. The primary prerequisite is to have it assigned to a specific site so that it understands which site it belongs to and it creates a correlation between the rest of the devices which is nearby and it creates the data which is relevant to it.17:35So it's primarily required to have it assigned to a specific site and the device that i've done the discovery process, there are like few technologies or few methods that the catalyst center uses for discovery, like the IP through the IP range, through CDP, through LLDP depending on whatever your environment prefers to use.17:55Once your device is discovered, they are added to the inventory and after which you create a site hierarchy, which is the primary key thing I would suggest because as you create a site hierarchy, catalyst center better to understand how your network is being structured and.18:14Your data relevancy, like creating a correlation between the data which is collected from different part of the networks are best utilized to create a baseline and to find out what is the deviation and that helps you in identifying exactly where the issue is happening on which floor, on which building is the issue is happening.18:29It creates a very good amount of correlation and gives you a higher accurate information, which also would end up giving you a best way as to how you can fix the issue. Yes, so I'm sorry which you moved on to a different site is as I said it has to be.18:46Added to your inventory from there on the device has to be moved either to managing or to monitoring mode, assign it to a specific site and that that you will be good to go from there on to see information relevant to your site popping up on the assurance dashboard.19:03Is as I said, so this is about this is a key factor which we'd like to insist once again. Provisioning is required, but what is mandatory is to have it assigned to a specific site. So if you can see from the snapshot, what you see on the extreme left is creating a hierarchy and assigning it to a specific site. Once it is.19:20That this allows the telemetry profile to be associated with that device.19:40And enables the location based reporting. That's the primary reason why we need to assign it. It enables the location based reporting, in the other words, don't think of assurance as waiting until the automation is completed. So it gains more operational visibility and insight the moment it is assigned to a specific site.19:44So this is how you go ahead and have this device assigned in case you would like to access some kind of wireless information allowing like the URL filtering to happening and make sure that it is assigned to a proper site and depending on depending on site and its requirement, you can go for.20:02Provisioning also. So with that, I'll quickly hand over to Lassia for a demo so that we can get a visibility into how this is manually being performed. Over to that. So now in this demo, in this 1st demo, we will be.20:21So we will be knowing how to onboard the devices, like what are the prerequisites, not how to onboard the devices, but the prerequisites, and then I will also take you to the assurance dashboard and give you an overview there. So now the 1st thing that we will have to check is.20:40The design and network settings here we will be having device credentials. So these device credentials have to be added at least a CLI and SNMP read. So at least these two credentials have to be added.20:58Why you might ask, these are required to add a device to catalyst center. So CLI will collect the configuration and SNMP will do the SNMP polling. So these two are required. You can go ahead and create a new ones by clicking on this managed credentials. So I am currently on two.21:163711 version team. So this is how the GUI will look.21:36Now you can go ahead and add the CLI SNMP credentials for this specific site or you can create for the whole system as well. So that is about credentials. And the next thing is we will have to add the devices to.21:40But before we do that, I would also want you to see one more thing that is our telemetry, those for that there is a setting called as device controllability. So now what happens is when we add the device and then we assign a device to a site.21:56All these settings that you observe here, these are monitoring settings which should be pushed from the catalyst center to the devices. And I also want to emphasize one point here that will not be changing any existing configuration. It will only be adding these monitoring configurations.22:15To collect the data collect telemetry from the devices. So now when a device is added to assigned to a site, if you enable this telemetry by default, this device controllability will be enabled, and if you keep this.22:35Team, all these settings will be pushed. But let's see if you disable this because of your security issues, then these will not be pushed and at the same telemetry also will not be collected. But again, for the telemetry to get collected and the assurance to start.22:53Popping up, it has to be collected. So what usually happens is then even though while assigning the site, these telemetry settings are not pushed, these can also be pushed through the inventory itself. So how you can do that is.23:11Provision inventory and here so I will select a device here which is managed reachable. So I select this device.23:27And here you will have telemetry, so update telemetry settings and if you click on this post configuration push, these will be pushed. So what I want to mention here is that these settings have to be pushed to the device for the catalyst center to monitor the device.23:41So that is only for assurance, these have to be pushed and one thing is these are not at all going to change any of the existing configuration. So you can be pushed this con you can push this configuration very confidently. So that is one thing.24:00And then once these are done, once this is cleared, another thing is telemetry settings. So another like these are all the telemetry settings that will be pushed, but let's say you don't want to have your catalyst center as a SNMP trap server.24:17That you can disable here by default, Atlas Center will be used as your SNMP trap server and it will also start collecting the application data that is, it will act as a netflow collector and it will also collect the wired endpoint data collection.24:34So this is what happens as a telemetry part, but let's say you want to add another SNMP trap server, you have another trap server in your environment, you can go ahead and do that by checking this box, you'll be able to add another IP address.24:52And since then, whenever you push these configurations, right? This particular SNMP trap server also will be pushed. This particular configuration for this SNMP trap server will also be pushed. So in this way, you can manage the telemetry settings by going to design network settings.25:08And now the next thing is onboarding the device. So how do you onboard the device is by going to tools discovery and here you will be able to see all the discoveries that you have ever done, but to create a new one, you click on add discovery on the right side top.25:28And give an IP address. Let's say you only want to add one device in that case, you can give the same IP address in both starting and ending, but let's say you want to add 20 devices at a time. Then you can give the start IP and this 20 devices in a specific subnet, then you can give the start IP.25:47And the last IP, let's say you want to add ten.one.1.one to ten.one.1.hundred. In these two particular IP, there are only 20 IPs in your particular network infrastructure. In that case what happens is when you give these two IP addresses, catalyst center will try to ping all the IP addresses that are.26:07They're in this particular subnet, but will only be able to onboard the devices.26:27That matches the SSH and SNMP credentials that you will be providing in the next step. So now I what I'll do is I'll just give two, IP addresses and then you can go ahead and select one of the credentials that we have created in the network settings page or else.26:32We can also create job specific that is these particular credentials will only be used for this particular discovery. I will select one of these and also SNMP read is also a prerequisite. I'll go ahead and do that also.26:49And then next. So here you can discover the new devices or you can discover the all the devices that you have given in the specific IP address range and then also you can assign the devices to an existing site or else you can opt out of it. You can do that later as well.27:05So this is how you can discover the devices in the next step it will just give you a summary and you can start the discussion. Now we have been mentioning site site, but how do you actually create a site? So that you can go ahead and do by.27:22Going to network hierarchy in design page. So now in catalyst center, there is a network hierarchy. You can have an area and in an area there will be buildings and in a building you can have floors.27:39So how do you create these particular hierarchies is just click on this three.menu beside the global and add area. You can give a name to this area. You don't need to give any long any coordinates, whereas when you try to create an building.27:54That building will only be created within an area. So 1st you'll have to create an area and then you'll be able to create a building. So when you create a building, you can give a name, but at the same time you need to give address. You can give the address or you can directly give the coordinates of that particular building. That is also.28:12Now, within an area you can have another areas, another sub area. So let's say you have Bangalore and in Bangalore, let's say you have two offices, then you can create a core Mango office and then you can create another office.28:33So in this way you can create an area within an area. And then once you create a building, you can go ahead and create floors also. So you see here currently I'm not able to create any floor. That is because this is an area.28:48Buildings can only be created within a floor. So this is also another area. Now, yeah. So I can go ahead and click create a floor here because this is a building. Now you can give a name to this and based on the RF model of your specific floor, you can.29:03Select that and floor number.29:23And then floor image. If you map your floor image, you can get this AP placement as well and you'll be able to generate a heat map to understand the strength. So in this way you can create the sites on catalyst center and get heat map to understand the why.29:26Now that is about prerequisites. Now, once you add the device, you have created your sites, you have created or you have onboarded devices, you have created all the telemetry settings, but the next step and which is very important for our daily purpose.29:48Is assurance health. So once the device is added and it is successfully managed, all the devices will start sending telemetry to the devices to and for us to understand how healthy is our network. So this is actually our lab network. You can see that there are several.30:04Devices here and that is router core. Now you will be able to see how many of your devices based on the device type, how many of your devices are actually healthy. So if you observe that is one distribution switch here, but that switch is also not sending data.30:24Then you'll have to go and troubleshoot why this is actually not sending, is it because it is the telemetry use telemetry settings are not pushed or is there any other issue? Is there connectivity issue? Because there are some ports that you have to open, but if they are not open, then obviously.30:41Device will not be able to send the telemetry. So in this way, you will be you'll need to troubleshoot you will be able to troubleshoot the data. So here yeah now in this particular points list, there are three access points. One is healthy and one is not sending any data but one is poor. Now what.30:59What you can do, so.31:19Why is this device poor? That is where actually help you. Now what you can do is, so this is network overview. You will be able to go back in the time for the last 30 days by going clicking on this time range, you can set the time range as 3 h 24 h, seven days.31:21But you can go back in the time in the time for the last 30 days, and so I'll just show you that. So let's say I select seven days. I'll be now today is 4th November I'll be able to go till 5th October. So I can ok select.31:41This one as 5th November and automatically it will take the next seven days data or else let's say I only want to know what happened on 5th October I can do that as well. So in this way, you can go back in the time for the last 30 days. Catalyst center has data for the last 30 days.31:58And then you can also select the site. You can get health of the data for a specific site as well. So you can go to a specific building specific area and all these data that we are seeing here will be changed according to the site.32:16Now you see we have net network and also one more thing, this is time graph. So as you move through the graph, this particular health will be changing. So based on that at that specific time what how devices are your how healthy are your devices?32:34That information will be shown here. And then this is your network devices data. So you'll be able to see how many devices are sending data, how many devices are not sending data, how many devices that are sending data are having good health, fair health or poor health.32:51And then if you scroll more down, we'll be having these widgets which will help us to understand how many APs are up and down and how many APs have, high client count, so there will be top N APs by client count.33:07And top any is by high interference rate. So that will be visible here and then all the network devices. So, at that specific point when at this specific point, there were NO poor network devices, basically there were NO network devices with poor health. So that is the reason we are not able to see.33:23You need data here, but when I click here all, you can see all the devices that are there in this specific site along with its manageability speakers overall health and issue counter. And then if I scroll more down I have this one link utilization and network devices reachability and link availability.33:43For the wired part. So in this way you will be able to get your device health and if you click on this particular device, you will be taken to device three 60 view where you will be able to get a granular view of this particular device.34:01I'll not be going through this in detail, but this is how it looks. Now similarly, we have client health as well. You will be able to see how many of your clients are actually healthy at that specific time. For that I will go to detail because here we don't have any clients.34:19Hello for that I will go to assurance health and client. So you'll be able to see how healthy your wireless clients are, how healthy your wired clients are, and how many of your clients have actually connected and how many are not connected. If they're not connected, what is the.34:37Reason for them for not being connected. So in this way you'll be able to get all this data and you see that I as I hover over this particular time graph, I'll be able to see the health status for my wireless and wired clients. Just refresh this page.34:57So now you'll be able to see wireless clients by your client's data as well it's just loading team. Just give me a moment.35:16Okay.35:36So here actually, I think it is taking some time to load, but you will be able to see how many of your wireless clients are active or inactive and if they are not connected, what is the reason for them for not being connected and at the same time, how many of your wired clients are actually connected and how healthy they are?35:38And how many clients are not sending any data. So in this way you'll be able to see that data. And then if you enable AI analytics, you'll be able to get this site analytics where you'll be able to understand the all the site analytics like onboarding attempts, onboarding duration, roaming duration, coverage. And this way you'll be.35:58Able to get this site analytics for a specific site. And if we scroll more down, we will be able to get these clients onboarding times connectivity SNR, so these are like dashboards which will help us to understand where we'll have to start our troubleshooting. So now you see there is there are three clients which have.36:18RSSI less than -72. In that case, we'll have to start the troubleshooting with these clients. Why are these particular clients are not having RSSI less than -72 dbm? Is it because they are very far from and they're not far from a specific AP and they are not.36:38Reassociating with a nearby AP or whatever reason it could be. But we'll we'll be able to start the troubleshooting with this particular dashboard. And then client onboard we'll also be able to see client onboarding times, client count for SSID connectivity physical client.36:56And then client devices, all the client devices wireless wired, you can filter those based on the overall health or the data or the type of the client. And similarly how we have device three 60, we also have client three 60 which will give granular details about a client.37:13Like to which particular switch or AP this particular client has been disconnected and what are its metrics like is it disassociated why if it's disassociated, why are, why is it disassociated like all the details?37:33That will be popping up here for some reason it is not loading. But again, this is a lab environment, so I don't have any problem but yeah you will be able to get all that details about a client.37:49And that is a brief about assurance and now to continue with the presentation, I'll hand it over to now what we're gonna discuss 2nd topic of discussion here is the catalyst center, Cisco Catalyst Center license manager.38:04So catalyst centers license manager gives you a privilege of centralized way of monitoring and managing how your Cisco software entitlement is done. So this primarily helps in scenarios where to give you a quick example.38:21There has been scenarios where when a device is not properly licensed, a certain level of capability or certain level of feature that we or use case which we expect to work may not work as expected. Without having to notice the basics.38:39They have been a scenario where we'll go over doing the advanced level of troubleshooting and all of this. Now, if you ask me where which scenario this happens in a scenario where you'll have to manually go ahead, align the license to each of the device, look into it for all the number of devices that you have. So there can be a scenario where you, you may.38:56You may not miss having the license properly assigned. So in scenarios where the device is replaced and all that.39:15You'll have to keep a tab on it, go back and assign the license. So keeping that in mind, this has been a privilege or an advantage to a managing the network, I would say. Catalyst center gives you a possibility and helps you manage.39:21Gives you option to manage your license centralized, and now this becomes especially valuable in large environments where you have hundreds or even a thousands of devices keeping track of each devices, whether they're being licensed or not, which one is out of compliance.39:38Whether the license is nearing the expiration manually or or like to create a complete visibility, this feature helps you very much. Quickly looking into the prerequisites of what is needed to achieve this is you would need a.39:53Access, a privilege access, which means you would need either a super admin role or only when you have the privilege to go ahead and, you know, a super admin privilege, you'll be allowed to have these Cisco smart account credentials.40:09To integrate it with your catalyst center. So how it works is that you need to have a certain level of privilege and your credentials, your Cisco user ID and password to your smart account and you need to have a reachability between the Cisco DNA center.40:25To the tool which is tool.cisco.com to register with a smart account. And this device which you're like trying to check or trying to have the license assigned should be managed, should be part of your inventory and should be assigned to a specific site and also should have reachability to tool.cisco.com.40:40So that the license, like once this is integrated, you will be given the privilege to have the license assigned automatically. And in terms of software requirement, there's a minimum requirement that is there. Switches needs to be on sixteen.9.one or robot.40:59The routers, the is devices could be 16 or ten or above. Certain level of ports needs to be allowed or requests to be opened for FQDN and URL needs to be permitted and the registration of smart license using like this portal has to be like software version of 17 three.two and above. These are the very limited prerequisites that you.41:14Now once this is done, like once the prerequisite and all is completed, what you can do is the catalyst center integrates directly with the Cisco smart account, allowing the organization to manage the license centrally. One useful capability is the ability to configure.41:35Multiple smart account, although you can have a multiple smart account or you, the primary thing that you can do is you should attach, only with your whichever you call it or name it as your primary account and you can also associate a virtual account which is particularly useful for that organization.41:51Having said that you can have multiple virtual account for multiple entities or even say if you have a common business or an organization can have different entities and each of its entities can have a different virtual account. So you can associate it with whichever virtual account is relevant for your specific entity.42:10Another helpful feature is automatic registration of smart license being enabled as they have been added to the catalyst center. This reduces a lot of manual work in help in ensuring that the devices are licensed consistently from day one, which means from the very 1st day when the device was brought into inventory and assigned to a site.42:28The license would be assigned and it will be consistently maintained and any scenario like the license expression is nearing and you will be notified with that. And another important point that sometimes is an added advantage as I see is.42:47Registering the appliance with your primary smart account is highly recommended, I would say, and the platform support registration using three methods, whatever possible method that you have, like based on whatever your organization prefers, which is directly using a smart account. The next one is proxy mode.43:05Depending on the network architecture or if your organization uses an on prem CSSM deployment, there are some considerations to keep in mind only in case of on prem. So it's always important to review the deployment model based on whatever your organization prefers to use.43:24Ultimately the registering, the registrations, the appliance is one time step. Once it is done, it is all a smooth process. As you can see, this is how the window would look like for you to connect, once you get the home settings and Cisco and smart account. This is the minimum amount of setting that you would need to do.43:42You can go ahead and choose the option of your preference or whichever your organization prefers to use.44:01Direct on prem CSSM are the smart proxy based on the method or the mode that you choose, you can have the integration done and from there on it's just a one step process. Once it is done, seamlessly all your devices, the moment it's added to the inventory and assigned to a site.44:06Gets licensed and any information relevant to it will be notified directly. A quick demo over to you Lassia. So for the license manager, we have 1st we will have to add the smart account.44:23For that we need to go to system settings and here you can go to this particular smart account. You can add as many smart accounts you want, but only one would be the primary account. So currently there is a smart account that is already added here, but now if I want to add new one, I'll.44:39Need to authenticate using this particular email address which is associated with my smart account and then once that is done, it will be visible here.44:59So I can make a smart account as a I can make a smart account as a primary by changing it here. So you see, I can just do this and make that particular smart account as the primary one.45:09When I select a specific user, I'll also have to select the smart account and then save it. So in this way, we can select the primary smart account and also as already mentioned, you can auto register the smart license enabled devices.45:24Once they are onboarded to catalyst center, so if you click this particular checkbox, you can select to the virtual account and once the devices are added to catalyst center, they will be automatically be added to that particular virtual account.45:40And then smart licensing. So now smart licensing, as you might already know, this is very important to understand how the license utilization is happening in our infrastructure. So for that, the 1st step is to register catalyst center product.45:55Instance itself. So I have already done that. So you see this is the product instance name and this is where my catalyst center has been on registered and I'll also be able to see the registration status and license authorization status if it's compliant or not compliant.46:11And in this way I'll also be able to see all the view available licenses here in here. And then now one smart the registration is done, we have to select the connection mode for the reporting that.46:29Can be three more as already mentioned, direct connection on prem or smart proxy. So based on the, based on whatever is required preferred for you, you can select that and then the reporting will be sent to the system.46:47So if you select direct cloud or smart proxy, that the data will be sent to PSSM cloud or else if you select the on prem, in that case, there will be an on prem in your particular infrastructure and there the reporting will be sent there.47:02So in this way, the connection modes work and now license manager. So for that we will need to go to tools license manager, and here I will be able to see the primary account and all the virtual accounts that are available for that particular demo, internal smart account.47:19This is the primary account.47:38Now here I will be able to see the available new available licenses and basically purchase licenses and use licenses. So currently there are like four network advantage licenses that are being used and four DNA advantage.47:40So in this way I'll be able to get this chart which tells me how many licenses I have that I can use for the new switches that I have that I buy and in the similar way here, I'll be able to get more information. So here.47:59I'll be able to see the purchased, used and available. So now if you observe here there is like three 80 series trackable switch, there are three purchase licenses, but none of them are in use so I can use all these three switches for the.48:15Next set of switches. In a similar way you'll be able to get all this information for all the rest of your devices. And then you'll also be able to get the expiration date for all the license that you have.48:31So now as you hover over this particular graph bar chart, you will be able to get that. Now, I have a 9300 records series here and that is going to get expired in 2029 on 7 March. The similar way I'll be able to get all this information for all the rest of the licenses as well.48:48And now that is about this overview page and again you can filter these based on the license level, license term and device series as well. Now when I go to this licenses.49:08Also one more thing is that you can filter, let's say you only want to get this information for a specific virtual account, you can do that by selecting that virtual account that is also available. And then licenses. So here you will be able to see all your licenses that would that would be CNS, DNA.49:25The and network and OS licenses. And here in when you scroll down, you'll be able to see all the licenses that are associated to that particular smart account. If you're not we are not only able to see the catalyst licenses, we are able to see the eyes.49:45Basically security data center, all these licenses also will be available here. Whatever have been added to that specific smart account will be, present here. That is about licenses.50:04And then you'll also be able to see the total licenses, how many are about to get expired and how many are non compliant, that means like how many licenses are being used even though they are not in availability. And that is what the licenses page. Now if I go to this devices.50:19I'll also be I'll go to global. I'll also be able to see all the devices along with this particular license information. So now this border to C 9500 E two has DNA advantage. I can get that information right away in this space instead of going to smart account and checking for it.50:39And not only that, you can also change the licenses by selecting that device and go to actions, change the license, you can go ahead and change the license, you can either remove it or since it is currently having advantage, you can go and change it to essential.51:00So in this way you can change the license level as well. And there are other actions also. So I'll just select those. You can change the virtual account manage if you if your device is not registered, you can go ahead and register it to smart account as well.51:16And then you can manage the license reservation as well. So from this you can basically manage all your licenses on the devices that are onboarded on your catalyst center. And then reporting. So we will also be able to see the reporting data like how frequently that reporting has is being.51:32Done. And you can also go ahead and start the reporting sync also from this particular page.51:52So in this way and also sync status like you will be able to see the sync status like how frequently they are getting synced with CSSM, that information also can be seen here automatically. And in this way you will be able to manage all your licenses directly from catalyst center for the.51:57The devices that are onboarded here on the catalyst center. And now I would like to hand it over back to continue his presentation. Thank you. So this is bringing us to the.52:17Very last topic of discussion for today. That's the application experience in catalyst center. So what is application experience? Application experience sometimes referred to as Apex.52:37Is build on three pillars, as you can see from screen. One is the application visibility, application policy and application assurance. The 1st is application visibility. Before you can optimize anything, you need to understand what is running on your network.52:53Visibility provides you an awareness of standard applications, the cloud services, the encrypted traffic or even the custom application that's running on your network. 2nd is application policy. Now once you know what is running on your network.53:12You will understand what are the traffic or what is the application that needs priority, that needs to be prioritized. What are the business critical applications? Using the intent policies or like in case of doing a manual configuration for almost all the applications that's running in your environment.53:27You can understand which application is business critical and which is important. 3rd one is application assurance. Now this is where the validation occurs. This is where the catalyst center validates whether those policies are actually being or actually delivering the desired experience.53:46Together all these three capabilities create a closed operational loop. Visibility would tell you what's happening. Policy defines what tells you what should be happening and who gets the priority and assurance verify whether actually both of these functionalities are happening or not.54:04That's much more effective way to approach much more effective approach I would say than configuring QS policy for almost all the traffic in your network. Application visibility, the intent based application prioritization.54:22Now that we know what is an application experience, looking deep into the technology this one of the biggest operational challenge today is to understand what applications are actually being used in your network. A little long ago, it was all like a web browser application.54:38File sharings, emails, a very few applications that would run on any organizations we could say. But today there are like a lot of cloud service cloud service SaaS platform, collaboration tools encrypted traffic, a lot of streaming data, a lot of it runs on your network. Now without having a proper visibility.54:58You would just feel like a lot of packets that are like being run through the network. To have a proper visibility as to each of these applications, we use something called as N bar two. Catalyst center using this can identify a thousand of applications including many encrypted ones.55:18This means your operation team can tell you which application is consuming a lot of data, which application is business critical, are these actually using the collaborative tools? The tools that you invested is being properly used if it is utilizing the proper bandwidth.55:36Or if there's any other non critical business application which is consuming a lot of data, all of this can be given a proper visibility into, but visibility is, is only the 1st step. Once you know what on your network, what is on your network, you can start prioritizing the traffic based on the business intent.55:52E.g., if you have a upgrade process that's running, if you have a meeting in as a 1st thing in the day and there's a lot of your devices in your network is going through a device software upgrade also, if you have a proper visibility into which activity is consuming a lot of data.56:10You know who which application needs to get a better priority at that point of time. So without which there can be a lot of scenarios where the teams meetings would start running on and some would see a lot of lags or some would see a drop and all of this and we'll end up troubleshooting for hours together.56:29So that can very well be overcome using this method. Now that is about n bar, but what is even more important is that yes, what is the C bar? Now this is what I said is little more important.56:46We call this a control controller based application recognition or a Siva. So this is more like a centralized intelligence behind the application visibility. For you to create an application visibility or for the catalyst center to create the application visibility and present in front of you.57:04Traditionally if you want a device to recognize new applications, and how do you up identify an application like finding out which protocol pack that it used. So this C bar is going to act as its central.57:22Send to member to find out the protocol packs and it is going to notify across a completely real network. C bar simplifies this by managing the protocol packs centrally from the catalyst center. It continuously keeps the application signature up to date.57:38And distribute those updated information across the supported devices. Another powerful capability is to support for custom applications. Recognizing the well known applications and finding out what are the protocols used behind it is a task.57:54But to identify a custom based application, like there are a lot of organizations who right now run a lot of application that is inbuilt on their organization or custom built for, for specifically for their organization so forth. So allows administrator to define those applications so they can also be recognized monitored and incorporated.58:09Into the application policy. Now this is a key factor because not every network would run on a known devices and in scenarios there can be a lot of customers who say like.58:29We have a custom application in our network. Well catalyst center, we still be able to recognize our device and pop up the data and populate it on the dashboard. Yes, it is definitely achievable using Siva, which is gonna learn the protocol that it is being used centrally and it is gonna distribute this information.58:39To all the supported devices across the network. This helps in maintaining sanity of identifying even the custom build devices and information get equally updated like how it is done for the known set of devices.58:56The last one is about site based access. As your organization goes, there can be, as you can see there can be a lot of hierarchy that we build in the assurance or like when you build on any network. So if you had to give, if you had to give access to almost all the hierarchy and all the administrators.59:12This could be very challenging when you have to identify who made this changes and where they made the changes.59:32Or accidentally if they have to make changes in a wrong site, there can be a scenario where this can completely bring up the side by itself without understanding what is what. So in such scenarios where the site based access placed, we call it a site based role based access control or a site based.59:37RBAC, which comes in. It gives you the privilege you can grant access at the area level, building level or even on the floor level. E.g. an IT professional or an IT member who's responsible on it for Mumbai does need administrative access to Bangalore or Delhi.59:56Yes, the access can be given to only wherever it is required for them to go ahead and make the changes. This improves both operational efficiency and the security and it also reduces risk of accidental configuration changes, which is done in and across the network.01:00:13And yes, we find it very useful and we would suggest that this is a very useful way in limiting or granting the access to whoever needs it. So with that, we would see a quick demo of all of this over to you Lassia, thank you.01:00:30I forgot to mention one more thing, so this is the compatibility matrix, we'll share the link for this. So this is where you can find like the compatibility of your particular devices with catalyst center that you are running center version that you are running. So and also you'll be able to see the features sets that are available.01:00:48For that specific device. So I'll also share this on the chat once this demo is done, but you'll be able to get the compatibility information here on this compatibility matrix. And now we will look at the application visibility part and application experience part.01:01:07So for application visibility, you need to go to provision and application visibility. So what catalyst center can do is it will be able to collect the application data. It will act as a network collector and it will be able to recognize the applications and will tell you how good your applications are.01:01:25How healthy your applications are and like the bandwidth and the usage of this particular application.01:01:45Now you in this particular overview page, you will be able to see how many application devices have been enabled with application recognition and how many devices have been enabled with C bar, so here we are only talking about N bar and here we're talking about.01:01:52And how many devices have been enabled by application telemetry. So in this way, we will be able to get that data here and then you will also be able to see how many applications are there and how many built in applications custom applications discovered applications.01:02:11And the service health and devices health as well. Now if I go to this network devices enablement, I can enable application telemetry in two ways. I can do that by going to inventory selecting the device and.01:02:26Selecting on a telemetry base and then upgrade the enable the application telemetry or else if I wanted I can also do this in this way. So now I can select a device and select.01:02:42I can select a device and I can enable application telemetry to disable application. And also I'll be able to get how ready are these particular devices for are for application telemetry deployment. So here you see they are failed and ok so now this one deployment status is complete.01:02:58Either.01:03:17And now deployment status for also can be viewed here like how many have actually successfully completed for and how many are completed for. And then now you can enable the also by going here enable C bar on selected devices. But for that 1st.01:03:18We will have to go to the extensions and enable CVR. So what will do is now n bar it will have specific.01:03:38Application signatures and it will be able to recognize those applications. Now let's say there are any new applications that have not been updated on that specific proto protocol pack. In that case, what we can do is we can use the bar and we can update those protocol packs that are that are there on your device. And not only that now let's say you have any custom.01:03:48Applications in your network.01:04:08In that case, you can get those recognized using C bar and since then catalyst center will be able to give information about those applications as well. So for that, it is important that we enable C bar cloud. And then you will hear able to see all the applications that are running based on the.01:04:09Any of the application?01:04:29And the application sets. So let's say you want to change the sets now ok and go to, yeah, so now let's say one of these you wanna move these apps to any other particular application set, you can do that by.01:04:31Keep Moving these from here to here, but this is how you can create application sets and modify those application sets.01:04:51And also not only that you can add a new application by going your application and you'll be able to add the application, give a server name and the IP port server basically server name or IP port or URL. And once you add those, catalyst center will start looking for that application information also and if it finds that also will be coming.01:04:58Here coming on the application experience page. So again, as already mentioned on the chat, it is required that you have DNA advantage to enable application telemetry. So now once you enable application telemetry, we can go to assurance health.01:05:18And here in applications page, ok, so there is NO data here and go to another. So here in the applications page, applications are divided into three categories, business relevant, non business relevant and neutral. So.01:05:36Now we can we will be able to get this application health for all the categories and the application usage. So you see there are 13 business relevant applications and the application usage can be categorized in this way. So we have business relevant, irrelevant and default.01:05:55And then you'll also be able to find top applications by throughput and top endpoints by throughput, and then when you click on this particular client, you'll be able to see which applications it is using also. And then most applications by health, this is where actually we have to start troubleshooting.01:06:13And then, if we scroll more down I'll also be able to get this average throughput of a specific application packet loss, network latency, jitter, and if I click on this particular application, I will be taken to application three 60 and there I'll be able to see all the clients that are using that particular application as well.01:06:30Along with the with another settings like another metrics like a packet loss, latency, jitter in very detailed manner. So you see these are the exporters that are exporting this particular application and you'll be able to see all these metrics.01:06:50And then application endpoint. So in the top, you'll be able to see how how much is the latency packet loss for that application over time as well. Similarly how we were able to go through, go back in the time for devices and client help, you can do that for the application after.01:07:08And if is able to find any issues for a specific application, that also can be seen here. So that is about applications and I know we are past time team, but so sorry we'll just finish it. Now we have mentioned about site based right now you can do.01:07:25Get that by, so this is not this is into three.version team, so the current version that I'm running is, yeah. So it is three.two.three and this is.01:07:46And this site based site based available from three.version only. So currently I'm running three.two.three. So to create site based I need to go to settings, users and roles.01:08:03And here, you can go ahead and create your own role, create a new role or else we can restrict to these three only, but to create the access group, we need to go to access group and here we will need to create a new group.01:08:18Give a name to it and select the rule to which select the rule for this particular access group and select the site which will get this particular rule. And once you do that, you will be able to give access. Let's say you only want to give assurance access for that. In that case you can give observe.01:08:34Role and I only want to give this observer only role to North America whole North america. In that case, I'll just select observer only role in this role dropdown and North America. So in this way you'll be able to get five back from.01:08:53So that is about today's demo team. Now I'll be we have some I think we have answered all of almost all of the questions, but we do have a request team, so.01:09:14Once you end this particular session, you will be redirected to a feedback and you we request you to please give that feedback to improve our future offerings. Also, you can reach us out through this particular email.01:09:28If you have any queries, I hope we have answered almost all of the queries, but if you have any queries, please reach us out through this particular email that I have given. Yeah, I'll also share the compatibility matrix link here.01:09:45Yep, I have shared that as well. And also this recording will be shared on cisco.com once the session is ended yeah so thank you team and thank you for your time. Have a good day.01:10:08