Cisco Catalyst and Meraki: Better Together in a Cloud-Managed World

Alright, hello, everyone. Thank you for taking the time to be with us today.00:11Before we get started on our session today, I just wanted to take a moment to mention Cisco IQ and share some of the upcoming EIS sessions for Cisco IQ. We all know the pain of siloed data and manual processes and we all know what it's like trying to keep track of assets.00:20That's, maybe you have some expensive asset management tools, maybe you just have a spreadsheet of serial numbers and contracts assuming you can even find it when you need it. Too often, you don't find out about aging hardware or vulnerabilities until it's already a problem.00:37And quite often, you might be connecting to a device to retrieve serial numbers and software versions. Cisco IQ is built to cut through that noise. We've taken 40 years of Cisco experience, telemetry and best practices and built it into the platform. For things this unlocks for you, completely.00:55Landscape clarity, meaning one current view across your whole Cisco footprint. You may hear this referred to as your estate.01:15Proactive resilience provides AI driven assessments that flag issues before they become issues. Rapid resolution with enhanced searching is powered by AI and reduces hours of searching into minutes, saving your team real time and contextualized professional services like how.01:25Having a Cisco expert on your team. And the best part is this is all included with your existing service contracts.01:44If you would like to learn more about Cisco IQ, please consider registering for the EIS series. We're halfway through the October series, but you can visit community.cisco.com then go to webinars and events and then customer success webinars to find upcoming sessions and watch.01:55Plays of past webinars when they're posted. So I think within the next, you know, few weeks he'll, you can go there and see the schedule for the November sessions.02:15And now what you've all came here for today, Cisco Catalyst and Meraki, better together in a cloud managed world. My name is Jason and together with my fellow customer success representative, we'll, we're going to talk.02:25Talk about cloud management for catalyst switches and we'll cover both device onboarding and configuration in the dashboard.02:45Please use the Slido for Q and A You can join the Slido by going to the bottom right hand corner of the screen next to the chat bubble and clicking the three dots. Then click Slido and you should be able to see the Q and A.02:58If you'd prefer you can go to slider.com and under the code in the middle box. If you have any issues with Slido or anything else, please send a direct message to one of the panelists. We have myself, Max, Dan, and Robbie on board with us today as well as Iram.03:12And they will try to help you out. We'll leave the Slido open for two weeks. If you don't have the answer to your question today, we'll follow up in Slido when we have the answer for you, so you could check back there. Additionally.03:29An interactive live Q and A will follow the presentation, allowing your questions to be addressed directly. We'll also be posting links to documentation and the further topics discussed discussed during the presentation at that time.03:46Alright, let's get started with the session and take a look at our agenda. We will start with an overview of cloud management, discuss the two options for configuration sources.04:04What needs to be in place to onboard each of the configuration sources, what it looks like to onboard each? We'll also take a look closer look at features and we'll end with a Q and A.04:16So why move to cloud management? What are you trying to achieve to achieve by bringing devices into the dashboard? Our goal is to blend the simplicity of the cloud with the performance capability of the full iOS XE feature set.04:33Throughout this presentation, we'll show you how we go about doing that. The 1st thing you need is hardware and the beauty of cloud management with cloud enabled iOS XE is that you get a unified cloud platform built on your existing infrastructure. As you can see catalyst.04:51200 9395 hundreds are listed on this slide.05:11There are too many supported models to list and we'll provide a link to the supported models during the Q and A portion. The list of supported models is updated regularly. Since I put this slide together 93 fifties and 95 fifties have been added to the list and amongst others. So be sure to check back.05:15If the switch you're looking for isn't currently listed, it's very likely it will be soon. The real key here is that you don't need new hardware to move to the cloud.05:36Bringing let me sorry about that. Bringing your catalyst switches into the dashboard allows you to take full advantage of the cloud platform, giving you a unified view of your cloud or your Cisco network infrastructure.05:50You gain data driven insights, the ability to see the devices connected across your network and application visibility into your network traffic. You also gain the visibility needed to optimize your network and accelerate troubleshooting with port level packet and error counter and error counters, proactive dashboard alerts a.06:05Cloud CLI and remote packet captures. Another great aspect of cloud management is the flexibility of choosing the configuration source for your switch.06:25There are two configuration sources, cloud management with configuration source cloud, which I will refer to as cloud mode and cloud management with configuration source device, which I will refer to as device mode. The key difference between configuration sources is that with cloud mode, the switch becomes full.06:42Be cloud managed, meaning that the configuration is performed from the dashboard and then pushed.07:02Dashboard to your switch. With device mode, the switch is configured via the CLI. That configuration stays with the switch and is pushed to the dashboard. So you gain additional insights visibility, and features from the dashboard that you wouldn't have with just SSH access to your switch.07:09Having these two options allows you to maintain operational flexibility, but also gain the cloud management just a little history for this prior to iOS XE 1715, we were using a container based architecture.07:28That leveraged a container to proxy communication between dashboard and the switch. You may have seen some CS firmware or catalyst switches in the dashboard. Moving forward, any existing switches on the CS firmware will need to be transitioned to iOS XE 1715 plus.07:48Any new switch that you bring into the dashboard will start with iOS XE 1715 plus. Aside from all the speed and storage benefits moving away from the container, we'll re up space on the switch for things like thousand eyes, which should be coming in the near future.08:08Now let's talk a little bit about each of the configuration sources. 1st up we have cloud mode, which provides a fully cloud managed experience. After transitioning cloud mode, your switch is exclusively managed via the dashboard UI, the switch config is stored in the cloud and see.08:24To iOS XE.08:44Once you move to cloud mode, you won't be able to access the CLI of the switch with the console cable. There is a local status page for iOS XE switches to supplement that, and we'll talk about that a little bit more in a bit. But you don't have local console access currently do have cloud CLI, which allows you to remotely run showcase.08:46Commands.09:06From dashboard it's typically at this point of the presentation, we usually see a question pop into Q and A or chat, you know, something like what if my switch lose connection to the cloud? So let's take a few minutes and we'll talk about that before we move to configuration source device.09:06With the dashboard configuration, you know, configuration source cloud, we have the ability to take advantage of safe config on the cloud dashboard. And so if a device has connectivity to the cloud and has.09:31Hasn't rebooted for 30 min following a configuration change?09:46That configuration is marked as safe. If the configuration change causes a loss of connectivity, iOS XE will automatically roll back the unsafe config after 2 h. And after a rollback, you'll see an alert status in the configuration section.09:50Of your switch page and dashboard and it will say configuration's out of date and then give you some more information. It'll tell you that it's reverted to a safe config and give you a timeframe. You want to fix this as soon as possible because after a period of time, dashboard will try to push that.10:09You know.10:29The Configuration that caused the issue back to the switch, which would cause the switch to roll back the config and you'll see this kind of loop of the configuration being pushed and then rolled back in dashboard. If you see the kind of green and red dashes for connectivity and dashboard, this could be, you know.10:30One of the causes of that. And the device, the good thing about this is the device won't reboot during this time and all the clients stay connected so from a client perspective, nothing changes. It's just.10:50The connectivity to the cloud, you know, if that gets lost, you'll see this. The other option we have is a local status page. If needed, you have access to local status page via the management port of the switch. This will give you the ability to make changes to the switch manually.11:02And, this topic is covered in detail in two Cisco live recordings, which are really good. I'll paste those during the Q and A portion as well. They go into a lot more detail about you know what happens if configuration, if connectivity is lost and different options you have.11:22So now that we've kind of addressed that a little bit, let's move over to, configuration source device. Moving to device mode allows you to retain the features and CLI level of control you've always had. Configuration is stored in iOS.11:40And then synced with the cloud for backup in comparison.12:00Device mode gives you access to cloud CLI and dashboard with read write capabilities just like you were SSh into the switch. Changes made via the cloud CLI can be seen in the dashboard change log, giving you visibility into what changes are being made and who is making them. You can also lock this down with the option.12:04To set access mode or the cloud CLI. You can have the, you have the option to for read only access or read write access. You can also require authentication to launch the cloud CLI.12:24Now we've discussed each of the configuration modes. Let's take a closer look at some of the available features. Health and assurance applies to both configuration sources. This is the data we're collecting from the switch including real time switch and port health.12:43From the dashboard, we can see what ports of connections and click into each port to show port status and traffic information. It's like running a show interface on a switch, but it's all right there for you in the dashboard and it's easy to access. There's app visibility and traffic analytics. We can see which clients are connected to.12:59Do a switch and take a step further with traffic analytics.13:19Image upgrades from dashboards. You can now upgrade both devices in both configuration source cloud and device from the dashboard. The capability to upgrade device mode switches was added, I think about a month ago now.13:24You'll still see this as a beta tag in the dashboard if you go to upgrade switch in in device mode, a few things to know before you schedule an upgrade for device mode switch, and this applies to standalone and switches, standalone switches and stacks.13:43A switch must be onboarded and connected to the dashboard 1st.14:02Switch must be in install mode. Bundle mode is not currently supported as within any upgrade save any unsaved configuration changes on the switch by writing to memory, plan a maintenance window for the upgrade and downgrades and rollbacks are not currently supported from the dashboard UI.14:06I'll include a link to the documentation for this as well during the Q and A For cloud mode switches, the process is the same as a traditional Meraki switch. Moving over to cloud CLI, this applies to both but in different ways for cloud mode, it's read only access, so you just have your show commands.14:28For device mode you have read write access.14:48You need to check early access in dashboard under organization configure early access to enable some of these features today. Currently cloud CLI for cloud native iOS XE and cloud monitoring packet capture are two things that you'll need to enable.14:52Alright, so where are we at? So far we've talked about cloud management, the two configuration sources, some features, and I'm sure you're saying that's great. What about licensing? Common question for us, I have some good news there.15:10Starting 1 February of this year, Cisco is offering a three year cloud entitlement for DNA licensing. That means if you have active DNA licensing, you can manage eligible catalyst switches and access points directly within the dashboard through 1 February of 2029 at NO doub.15:29Additional cost.15:46You leverage cloud based management without requiring a license exchange, additional purchase or any disruption to your current DNA investment. Supplies to catalyst 9000 hardware originally shipped with iOS XE software, and you can reach out to your account team to help you out with the various scenarios and questions.15:47As you may have there, you know, better suited to address all these kind of licensing questions.16:07Next, we'll cover the process of onboarding your switch into dashboard. The switching team has done an excellent job of making this a straightforward process. I'll cover this at a high level now and go into more detail in a bit. The 1st step is to upgrade the email.16:19May not need to do this if you're already on a supported version of iOS XE.16:36When you have your switches on a supported version, the next step is to establish the Meraki meraki tunnel connection. Do this verify all prerequisites are completed. When that is done, a tunnel to the Meraki cloud can be established after running the service Meraki Connect command.16:41As part of the connection process, we'll obtain a cloud ID and use that to easily claim and add devices in dashboard. Once we claim and add the devices, the configuration is automatically applied based on the mode selected.16:58If you selected configuration source cloud, the switch will factory reset and load into cloud mode. The configuration on the cloud is synced to the device. This can be a bit disruptive as it does take some time to complete the reset. When the process is completed, you then have a cloud switch.17:18When you select configuration source device, you'll need to enter a level 15 access credential for the switch, and dashboard uses the supplied credentials to access the switch, upload an EEM script and run that script. Script will add the code needed to send monitoring data back from the switch to the cloud.17:36Over the tunnel that was established.17:56The script does not change or remove existing code. When this is complete, the script is erased from flashed and it's non disruptive, the switch stays up during the entire process. Let's take a closer look at moving to configuration source cloud.17:59There are a few prerequisites. 1st, we need outbound access. We need to make sure outbound TCP port 443 access to the Cisco Cloud is active ensuring secure communication is established. Connectivity must be via a front panel.18:20Tunnel port, not the management interface. Default VRF is in operation for all cloud communications. IP routing mode is required for the Meraki tunnel service. We need to ensure routes are in place to reach external, including a default route.18:36The use of IP default gateway is not supported. A DNS needs to be configured in resolving host names for cloud and tunnel services. NTP should be synchronized and providing accurate time and also needs to be configured using local local authentication and authorization.18:56Once all the, that is confirmed, we can move on to connecting to the Meraki tunnel. Before we connect, we just want to double check that we are on a supported version. We can run a show version, check the version of the switch, and also run a show Meraki compatibility, as you can see.19:15See both the switch skew and version are compatible, so we're ok to move forward.19:35If we run a show meraki, we can see that this switch has not been connected to the Meraki cloud. That's because at this point in the process, we haven't run any commands to establish a connection between the switch and the cloud.19:43If we look at the output, there's NO cloud ID, which will need to claim the switch in dashboard. I just wanted to show you this so we can take a look at the changes before and after our next step. To establish the tunnel with the cloud, we run a service Meraki Connect.19:58Small note here. If you have one of the newer supported smart switches, you might see the command service cloud management connect. It's the same as running a service meraki connect is this different term is used.20:18If you'd like to see the tunnel come up, you can run a term on before running service Meraki Connect. After we run service Meraki Connect, you can run a show meraki connect to see the tunnel status in the cloud ID after the tunnel comes up.20:31Let's take another look at the show Meraki after we establish the tunnel. We now see some new information including the cloud ID, migration status and mode. At this point we have a switch that is connected to the Meraki Cloud.20:53No configuration has been pushed yet as we haven't claimed or added the device to the network.21:08Let's take a look at the next step and see how we do that. From our show Meraki, well our cloud ID and we know the tunnel is up. There are a few places you could start the process of adding your switch and will show you this in the demo.21:14Well, probably the most direct way is to go to the network where you'd like to add your switch, then go to switch the switches page and dashboard and click add switch. If you have per device licensing, you'll see an option to claim individual devices. If you have subscription licensing, you'll see a claim device button.21:34Then an option to claim individual devices. Either way, when you click on claim individual devices, you'll see a pop up window on the left. Here you enter the cloud ID of the switch and click claim device. This will bring the device into inventory.21:54At this point, dashboard knows that your organization has claimed this switch, but we haven't assigned it to a network yet. To this, we would select the switch from the inventory page and click add to network. This brings up the window on the right.22:13Where we select cloud configuration and click save. Because we selected cloud mode, the factory reset process will start and the switch will pull down the new configuration from dashboard. If we're not ready to do this, to push the config to the to switch at this point.22:30You could take note of the cloud ID, run a NO service meraki connect to break that tunnel, then come to dashboard and claim the device. And when you're ready for the switch to pull down its new config, you would run the service meraki connect again to reestablish that tunnel. So just to kind of recap that pro.22:50Process. If you don't want to push the config right away, you do a service meraki connect on the switch.23:09Copy your cloud ID, do a NO service Meraki connect to break the tunnel, then claim and add the device and dashboard, set up your configuration dashboard, any configuration changes you want to make. Then go back to your switch and run the service meraki connect again.23:17To reestablish the tunnel and then, and that will push the config to your switch. Once we have added the switch to the network, we can see it in dashboard with configuration source cloud.23:36Admittedly a lot of this is gonna look familiar, so we'll move through the device mode section fairly quickly. The only change to the prerequisites for device mode is the need for user privileges. We need a.23:55Device onboarding user account with privilege 15 access on the switch.24:11The compatibility check will look exactly the same. The show Meraki is the same. We follow the same exact steps to establish the tunnel and check status.24:17After we established tunnel, we'll see the cloud ID just like we did for configuration source cloud.24:41Oh Claiming an annual device to a network is where things look a little different. We follow the same process to claim the device, went to the cloud ID of the switch in the box on the left, just like we did for cloud mode.24:50This will bring the device into inventory. At this point dashboard knows that your organization has claimed the switch, but we haven't assigned the switch to a network yet. To this, we'll select the switch from the inventory page, click add to network.25:07This is where we select device configuration for device mode and click next. Because we selected device configuration, we need to enter the username and password we talked about so that we can make the necessary config changes to the switch.25:22Logging next we'll start the process of dashboard pushing the EM script to the switch, allowing the switch to send information back to the Meraki cloud. And once we have added the switch to the network, we can see it in dashboard with configuration source device.25:40Yeah now I will hand it over to take over and show us the demo. Appreciate it. It's, good afternoon, everyone. My name is it's a pleasure to be here in front of you all today.26:00And what I aim to do now is just to cover everything my colleague Jason has stated and covered in these slides into an interactive demo. So let me go ahead and share my screen here real quick.26:15All right. Hopefully you can see my screen with the terminal window. Awesome. So I've connected into aC90 200 switch.26:32And I'm gonna go ahead and kick start the process to onboard a switch into the Meraki cloud. So 1st things 1st is we have a requirement to ensure that our firmware version is above iOS XE 1715 and above. So I'm gonna go ahead and run the show version command.26:49And just validate, 1st of all, my switch model number. We can see it's aC90 200 and we can see we're at 1718, which is above the requirement of having a minimum of iOS XE 1715, and we need to be installed mode.27:06So now that we've satisfied that requirement, we know we're on the correct software version. Now let's take a look to make sure that our hardware is compatible with the Meraki platform. So we're gonna go ahead and run another commands. We'll run show meraki compatibility. So what we're the key thing here is what we're gonna look for here is that our security.27:21Is there a model number here?27:41This output, it says it's compatible and it's compatible amongst the list of compatible SKUs here. So we're seeing that here with the C 9200 204T And we're seeing that here and it's saying that it's install mode and that it's compatible. So now we know that we have the correct software version to get us kick started and we know we have the correct hardware.27:43For us to onboard into the Meraki cloud. The next thing that we're gonna wanna do is, this process is gonna entail us registering the switch to connect to the Meraki cloud, and the Meraki cloud is gonna deliver it's gonna establish a tunnel with the Meraki cloud and that tunnel is going to deliver our services, our telemetry and our data.28:03So what we're gonna wanna do is we're gonna wanna ensure that our switch has outbound connectivity. So what we're gonna do is we're just gonna go ahead and take a look at our interfaces. Ensure that our interfaces are configured as we expect. They're up and running, they have outbound connectivity.28:23So we can see that here we verified that we got VLAN one interface, has its IP address, statuses up and running for this switch. And we want to ensure that we have DNS enabled as well. And what we're gonna do is test the connectivity directly to the Meraki dashboard.28:40So I'm gonna go ahead and ping dashboard.Meraki.com. That'll validate our DNS and our outbound connectivity. Alright, and we're able to see that we send five pings, and it's reporting the success rate of our pings is a hundred percent. So we know we're able to ping outbound.28:57To the Meraki cloud servers and we're getting a response back. So, that helps us validate our outbound connectivity. There are much more ports and IP ranges that need to be like white listed in your upstream network as a prerequisite, and I'll cycle back to that later after we register the switch and show you the list of those IP addresses and port ranges.29:15Next thing what we're gonna do is I just want to show you that this Meraki device hasn't connected yet or this, this catalyst C 9200 switch hasn't connected to the Meraki cloud yet. So when I run the show Meraki Connect command, it says service Meraki Connect is disabled.29:38So what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna switch into configuration mode and then run the service meraki connect command. And that's gonna go ahead and kick start the registration process of our switch, and it's going to establish two tunnels to the Meraki cloud.29:57There's gonna be a primary tunnel and there's gonna be a backup tunnel, and it does take a moment or two for it to establish and we should see an output here shortly on the screen. Yes, and it says our primary tunnel state has changed from down to up for the primary tunnel, and then our secondary tunnel has established as well.30:16So that we have just registered our catalyst C 9200 switch into the Meraki cloud. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna run that command that I ran earlier for show Meraki Connect just to validate the current status of our switch. Alright, so now we have a lot more rich detailed information.30:34When we run the show meraki connect command where as earlier since we didn't register it didn't output us anything.30:54So it says the fetch date, it says the fetch date succeeded, it's telling us the configuration server telling us our primary tunnel that we've connected to, our secondary tunnel, the network name says Meraki admin network. So Meraki admin network is a placeholder network. We actually happen to added our switch to a Meraki.31:01Dashboard network yet. So when we register a switch, it's gonna be placed into this placeholder Meraki admin network. So if you ever see that there, don't worry about it. It should change.31:21The moment you gain access to the Meraki dashboard and then add your switch to a formal network. So we're just verifying that our tunnel state is up and running for both the primary and the secondary. We can see, you know, the, the transmit receive packets here. And then here's the most important thing here where it says Meraki device registration. We're able to see the serial number of.31:32Switch, but we're able to see the cloud ID.31:52And this is gonna function as a Meraki serial number. So we're gonna wanna copy and paste this cloud ID. And this is how we're gonna establish that link with the switch and the Meraki dashboard. We're gonna take this cloud ID and we're gonna have it claimed into our inventory on the Meraki dashboard for us to be able to to manage that switch.31:54For us to be able to manage that switch via the Meraki cloud. So I've copied that there. So let me jump into the Meraki dashboard real quick, and I actually want to show you.32:13The required imports and IP ranges. So for you to gain access to the Meraki dashboard, you just have to navigate to just go to dashboard.Meraki.com, set up an account, and if you navigate here, on the dashboard top right corner, this help button.32:32You're able to click this firewall info page, and this is gonna give you a list of all the, all the required prerequisite IP ranges and ports that you'd have to have whitelisted or allowed beforehand in your upstream network for expected functionality of your devices. And you can see here there's like outbound for meraki.32:49Cloud communication, and it's broken down by, you know, IP ranges, source IP, destination IPs, fqdns, protocols. So it's very, very, informative in how it's output.33:07And if you have various equipment outside of your catalyst switches such as access points cameras, security appliances, it'll show you all the ports that you'll need to function, you'll need to whitelist for those devices as well. Just follow this column here where it says devices using this rule. So if you're trying to trying to white list for your switches, just look for the.33:21Rules that have switched as switches as a label here.33:41Alright, so now that we, we've covered the prerequisites and we've covered registering our catalyst switch catalyst switch with Meraki, what we're gonna do is that cloud ID that we've copied over, we're gonna go ahead and navigate to.33:46The organization inventory, so if we navigate to organization inventory here, this is a placeholder for all your devices. You can click claim device here and you're able to claim by two methods. If you have an order.34:03Name key, like if you have a Meraki order number, you can claim all your devices all at once.34:23Using that claim key or you can claim individual devices. So we're gonna use claim individual devices since we just have one cloud ID, and we're gonna input that here, and we're gonna click claim devices. Let me just copy this claim devices, it'll add that to our inventory.34:27And we can see the Mac address of our switch, our catalyst switch, we can see the cloud ID, we can see the model, and you can see here, it just has-as the network name here because we haven't added it to a network yet. And this is equivalent to the Meraki admin network placeholder that we saw in our terminal window.34:44So let me define two key concepts here with Meraki. We have what we call our organization. You can think of it as our overarching accounts, and within your organization exists networks. And networks you're able to create them based on, you know, things such as like.35:01Geographical positioning of devices, if they're all in the same LAN, if they're in the same region, if they're at the same site, it really is up to you how your what devices you're gonna group in those networks. But I'm gonna go ahead and add this device to a network. We'll select the checkbox here to the right. We're gonna click add to a network.35:19And then I'm just gonna add it to an existing network where you have the option to create a new network and you just have to type in the network name. So I'm gonna type add it to an existing network, and I'll put it into our EIS catalyst demo network. And I'll click next.35:37Now it's gonna prompt me for what type of mode I want to configure my device in. Do I want it to be in cloud configuration mode? Keep in mind that if you go into, if you put your set your device to cloud configuration mode, it is going to be managed exclusively via the the Meraki web, the Meraki Cloud Web user interface.35:52And you won't have access to the CLI except for show commands. So you won't be If you're used to configuring with the CLI terminal, I would I would, I would set device configuration instead of cloud configuration.36:12So for the purpose of this demo here, I'll select device configuration cause I do want to continue configuring our device via CLI and I'll just set our credentials here. It's gonna ask you for your level 15 configuration access credentials.36:29And I'll type in my credentials here, I'll clicked I accept the terms and conditions, and then I'll click next. And basically it's just gonna have us confirm everything that we input in the previous screen, and he wants us to confirm what mode.36:45We want to configure whether it's cloud mode, we wanna manage exclusively via the web interface or manage and configure via the web interface or if it's gonna be in device mode where we wanna manage it via the CLI, but we want to take advantage of all the rich telemetry that's available in the web interface as well.37:03So we'll click add to network here. It does take a few moments here for it to set up. So I already have a network here in our Chicago office where we have switches already up and running. So let me go ahead and just show you how the output looks like.37:21When you add a switch, to the network, we'll navigate here on our Meraki dashboard to switching switches page, and that'll give a list view of all the switches we've added to our network here. So you can see here in our Chicago office, these are actual switches that are up and running. You're able to see the status of the switches if they're up and running, you're able to see the names of the switches, the MAC address, the connectivity status.37:41If at any point a switch goes offline, you're able to see a red sliver at that point in time, you're able to hover above it, it may give you a reason such as lots of power, something like that. So it gives you that visibility across your devices in one pane of glass. It gives us to your cloud IDs, your local IPs.38:01Your configuration source, whether these devices are using cloud configuration, they're enable they've been set up in cloud mode or if they've been set up in device mode. You're able to see the upgrade status. If you initiate a firmware upgrade via the Meraki dashboard, you're able to see the firmware upgrade status live.38:19This model number of the switch and we can actually add additional columns here. We have this widget here on the top right, top right corner of the screen. If we want added telemetry here for our switch overview, we can add them here such as alerts, public IP, configuration status, firmware versions, so on and so forth.38:36We can add those columns here and we'll be able to see them here in a centralized view. What we're able to see the alerts, how many switches are offline, how many are alerting, how much are online, how much are dormant. Dormant means the switch has been offline for a period of up to seven days.38:55I believe seven days or more. So let's hop into our switch switches here. I want to show you the difference between a switch and cloud mode and a switch and device configuration mode. So let's start with cloud mode. So 1st things 1st, when you click on one of the switches in the list.39:10It's gonna show you an output similar to this, right? You're able to see the name of the switch that you've named named it. You're able to see the the model number of the switch. You're able to see the MAC address, address, serial number. This is very vital here, the last time it rebooted the boot reason, it's gonna link you to the event log here.39:30If the configuration is up to date, firmware version, IP info, gateway info, DNS info, you're able to see your ports that are in use. Ports that are not in use are defaulted to black. Ports that are in use, are green and ports that are using PoE, you're gonna see a thu.39:49Underbolt icon on top of.40:09The green port. So for this switch, there's NO devices using PoE, but I just want you to get the picture here and then we can see our uplink port here it's denoted with this arrow. You're able to see some historical device data for the switch, connectivity status, you're able to go back in time.40:11You're able to see the usage details for the switch, you're able to see the clients that are connected into that switch, usage details for those clients, MAC address, IP addresses, there's any adaptive policy groups on them, VLANs port VLANs, so on and so forth, and then you can expand upon that as well.40:29Alright, and then furthermore, you can go into the The key difference here with cloud configuration mode is your configurations are managed from the cloud. So if I click on one of these ports here, like port 30 here, I'm seeing all the port details and configurations here, right? Like I'm seeing it says VLAN 300. If I want.40:49Edit the port configuration here, I'm gonna click the edit button. I can go to the VLAN section, and then I can change the VLAN. I can put like VLAN 200 for instance, VLAN 01:50, and then I could, I could actually disable the port from the cloud. It's very.41:09Nifty for remote management, I can turn on PoE I can disable it. You have a wide variety of configuration options that you can manage the switch from the cloud and.41:28So in terms of cloud configuration mode, you have access to all the rich telemetry that the dashboard has to offer, and you have access to configure manage your configurations via the cloud, and then you have a cloud CLI. So you're able to launch the terminal window here. You have a CLI window here, but you cannot run configuration.41:43Clis, you're able to run just show commands via the CLI terminal, like I just ran show LLDP neighbors and showed the HCP lease, and you're able to see the output of those show commands here.42:04Just to help you with troubleshooting, you can detach the terminal as well and bring it into a full screen and you have that option with the cloud configuration mode. You are able to see your session history here.42:18Start time of your session, complete time, which user connected into it. You're able to download the session logs, so a lot of vital loggings here as well, and then we've automated show commands as well since show commands are very popular for troubleshooting. If you don't want to go ahead and type in commands into the CLI window, you can go ahead and and run a command from here.42:35You can run a command from here select which port, and just run the output. It'll actually open up like an embedded, a new embedded CLI window here and show you the output for that automated show command. Further on, we're able to move on to device health.42:57Tab I already have it opened up here since it takes a moment to load up, we're able to see rich telemetry on our power supplies and if we're using any, if we have any PoE consumption or budget on the switch as well, so there's NO PoE devices on this switch here, but I just wanted to show you the output, and it'll show you.43:14The name of the client, LLDP CDP information, and the amount of its PoE usage as well.43:34You'll be able to see that here on this tab. We also have our event logs for the switch, you're able to look at specific point in times if you're troubleshooting, you're able to see all the events that happened on the switch. And we, we capture those rich details here and output it for you, for your convenience here.43:39For the switch, and it's not only local to this switch, but you're able to query against all your switches that you have within your Meraki dashboard network. Then also we have embedded tools here. You're able to ping a device, whether it's a device on the local LAN or you want to ping a device on the internet, you can do.43:58That here, you can also test the connectivity to the Meraki cloud, click on ping switch. This is something I use all the time just to make sure I have outbound connectivity.44:17It will launch your terminal window from here. If you're in like a, a data center or something, there's a lot of devices and you want to identify this particular switch, you can blink the LED remotely. You can run a cable test. You can cycle ports remotely as well. And then you can run your tables, your routing table, your Mac forwarding table as well.44:26So let's move into cloud mode. There are a lot of similarities between cloud mode and device mode, but I want to just highlight, like you have the same rich output, you have the same rich telemetry that the Meraki dashboard offers.44:44Whether it's in cloud mode, whether it's in device mode, but the key difference between a device and cloud mode and device mode, this one here you can see the labeled configuration source device. If you click on a port here, you're able to see the output for its config, but notice here that there's NO edit option.45:01So you can't edit a device's ports, you can't manage configurations via the web user interface for a device configured in device mode. You would have to click into the cloud CLI, and then you would just launch the terminal and just run your configuration commands.45:17Normally that you would do in your like your terminal windows. So device configuration mode just to bring it back, take advantage of everything the dashboard has to offer. You have your embed embedded CLI and you run your configuration commands from the embedded CLI, and then you have access to everything else that configuration.45:35Mode has to offer, cloud mode has to offer such as the device health, the event log, the tools. But there's an additional tool.45:55There's an additional tool called config history for device mode. You can compare the changes between your config. So if I select, let's look at what my config was on 1 October versus 29 September, you're able to look at your running configs between the two dates and you're able to see the labels here.46:05And it shows you the various configuration changes that you've made between those two timestamps. So that's something that's here embedded as well to give you more visibility in in the configuration source, the device configuration source.46:23Another page that I want to show you as well, is, the assurance overview is something that can make your troubleshooting much more easier if you navigate here on the Meraki dashboard to assurance overview page.46:45And you click on network health score. It does take a moment for it to load up and you are able to, you have an option here, to load your telemetry from the last day, last week, last 2 h or I'll put in the last week here.47:01And what this page does is it enables network administrators to have a network health score. Like if say for instance, your network admin, you wanna log into the dashboard at the 1st point of the day and you want to gather all the trendings data of like what's going on in your environment. This is.47:17This is a good reference point. You can go to this page, look at the network health score. This network health score gives you a score out of a hundred, it's a culmination of the factors below, issues impacting your clients?47:37Issues affecting your network devices, issues impacting your net infrastructure connectivity, and if you have thousand eyes integrated issues impacting your applications. It all culminates into this network health score. On the right hand side of the screen here, you're able to see your network health score, and if there's any dip in the network health score, you can hover above it.47:46And it'll show you what that dip was attributed to. And then if you want to go into further details of what, like what were the issues that were impacting your network health score, like say for instance here, I'm managing my switches, let's go into issues impacting my wired wired clients. So I'll go ahead and click on that.48:03I'm seeing there's some authentication issues. So for this example, we have only two clients, but imagine if it was 50 or a hundred clients. We've picked up that trending data and we're showing here that these two clients were showing their Mac address and they've been affected by port port not forwarding traffic due to access policies.48:20So imagine you have 50 or a hundred users, you're able to see this trending statistic here and rather than waiting, you know, for like tickets, IT tickets, random IT tickets to trickle in one by one until you get that data and make that conclusion.48:38That this is actually happening in the environment, you're able to just log in here and see everything in a centralized view, all that aggregated data to help make your troubleshooting easier and to get to the root causes of what's impacting your network, much, much faster. And then also, we've expanded upon this with our assurance overview.48:53With network services, you're able to engage the health of, you know, radius.49:13DHCP, DNS, success rate and availability, response time, latency. We're expanding it more and more as time goes on, server health as well. And then also experience metrics, this is more gauged to wireless.49:19But this is here as well if you want to take advantage of that. And you can bring your catalyst, APs actually into the dashboard as well. Another page that I want to show you here is if we navigate to network wide topology page on the Meraki dashboard, this is a very.49:38Very, very helpful page as well. So as you add more and more switches into your, to your Meraki dashboard, and as your switches, as the telemetry is shared to the Meraki cloud, we're able to automatically draw a topology graph.49:56Without any configuration required. So you can see here, the only requirement is that your switches have to have LLDP enabled. If they have LLDP enabled, you're able to see this output. So these, a single rectangle would indicate a switch. You're able to hover hover above that rectangle, see the name of the switch.50:14Model number, active ports, direct clients. You see that it's connected to this grouping of rectangles, and this is this represents a switch stack. You're able to see each member of that switch stack. You're able to see the connection between this switch and this switch stack. If you hover above the link here.50:33It's gonna show you the ports. What ports are being directly interconnected between, you know, the, this link of your network between this switch and the switch back here. So you're able to hover hover, hover above that layer by layer and you're able to, it's able to draw the path for all the devices added to your network and then.50:49You know, we have other devices here as well. We have some catalyst, APs and we have some like Meraki cameras as well.51:09So we're able to reference this telemetry that's that's automated and out displayed here on the graph, so it's a very, very helpful tool. So I'm gonna jump back into, the final section here.51:16And this is in regards to automating firmware upgrades. So if we navigate to organization firmware upgrades page on the Meraki dashboard, so on this particular page here, you're able to see an overview of the latest software version under three categories recommended release, generally available and beta.51:33So if you want to get more information, you're able to see the the device type and you're able to see the firmware information. So for instance, if we're up interested in obtaining information about an available iOS XE firmware or we don't want to upgrade to an iOS xe firmware and we'll see a, what's the deal with with the firmware?51:52We can go ahead and click on here the firmware version. It's gonna pop up important notes about this firmware version. It's gonna talk about the release highlights of that version. And before you upgrade, here's some key considerations, and it gives you just a list of known issues, fixed issues.52:07A good level of detail for the for the firmware release notes and you're able to cycle between firmware versions. If you want to look at what happened between a previous version and a new version, you have that visibility here as well and you can cycle between the versions, and we have the three categories as well. So you're able to look into the three categories, we have the firmware status.52:26If devices need a critical updates or if there's a warning to, to upgrade your firmware, you're able to see the most previous firmware upgrades that have happened. You can see here 22 h ago by Meraki, we've upgraded.52:46The switch in this in their London office to this firmware version and we're able to schedule upgrades, through this, through this integrated UI as well, whether it's configuration source cloud or whether it's configuration source device. You have both options to upgrade your firmware. And let's say for instance, we.53:03Wanna run through a.53:24The motions of the firmware upgrade. I'm not gonna execute it, but let's let's show you how it goes through it. So we'll select device type switch and I want to upgrade in our Chicago office, and I'll select our network, and I'll click schedule upgrade, and I'll select our firmware version here, iOS XE, this is our current version.53:26It shows us our targeted firmware version as well.53:46Now we can select from a list which version we want and click next. And it's gonna say, hey, do you want to perform the upgrade now? Do you want to stage the firmware upgrade? And what staging means is essentially, you're able to take your different switches, put them in different groups, and then have them upgraded at different times. Like group one.53:49We want to upgrade it today at 12:00. Group two tomorrow at 02:00, group three, you know, the 3rd day at 04:00. The only, the key thing about staged upgrades is that you just need to upgrade all your switches in the network within a 30 day window. So you have a flexibility of 30 days.54:06To run a staged upgrades or if you want to just schedule your whole network to upgrade, like during a maintenance window, like 02:00 A.M. 03:00 A.M. 05:00 a.m.. You can schedule the date and the time here as well. And you're able to see schedule changes. Once you scheduled a switch firmware upgrade, you're able to see it.54:23Here, it's gonna show you basically the output that you've done in the, in the previous screen, which network, which time, who scheduled it, which admin scheduled it?54:43And when it's going to happen as well. So a very key thing here is if you're into visibility, having a lot of data metrics at your hand to empower you, you know, being proactive with tools such as like assurance.54:52Being able to centrally analyze yours man centrally manage your switches, whether it's, you know, in cloud configuration via the UI or if you're a CLI person, you're able to do that via the Meraki dashboard and CLI you'd have the full feature set for your switches in in device configuration mode.55:08And yeah, you were able to essentially manage the firmware of of all your switches via the meraki dashboard as well. So I'm gonna jump back into the presentation. I hope that was useful and beneficial to you all giving you that overview, and I'll jump back into the presentation.55:27Yeah. And I just want to overview some of the key concepts here that we've kind of covered via the demo. So with health and assurance, you're able to gain real time visibility into the catalyst switch platform. We're able to quickly identify issues, the trending, look at trending data.55:45And get proactive alerts. We're just able to ensure that our catalyst networks are optimized and secure with health and insurance.56:04We have introduction, we've introduced the cloud CLI terminal. It's it's embedded into the Meraki dashboard, whether you can manage your devices via the cloud or via device configuration mode and you're able to troubleshoot.56:16As as you would via the CLI terminal and you have access to the full feature set of iOS XE if you're configured in device configuration mode. So let's talk about some features. We've covered configuration history from the cloud. We're able to see the changes made to our catalyst switches.56:35We're able to gather like automatic snapshots between different periods of time, and we're able to compare current and past configurations as well to help us like be consistent with our troubleshooting and make sure and help us capture any changes or inadequaccies we see with our config.56:54So what's known improved with iOS XC 1715 five? We've there's, we've rolled out a ton of features into 17 155A lot of reliability improvements over a hundred bug fixes and enhancements have been bundled into the software version.57:14We expanded regional support as well. So now we're able to expand into China, India and Canada regions. So if you're interested in onboarding, you know, iOS 60 switches there, that's not fully supported as well. We've reduced upgrade times.57:34Which lead to a more optimized experience and NO longer we NO longer rely on ICMP for connectivity checks for uplink auto config. So cloud feature starting in 1718 one, you have smart ports. You're able to simplify your configuration with smart ports.57:49You're able to pre configure your port profiles to make sure there's NO configuration mishaps. Intelligent packet capture, you're able to schedule packet captures remotely with intelligent packet capture feature that we have bundled into the Meraki dashboard. Of course we have device health, you're able to receive alerts, you're able to see things such as your PoE.58:09The budgets.58:29And usage via that device health embedded tab, and you're able to see statistics relative to your device uptime, last reboot reason. You're able to link into the event log to see why it rebooted for the last time and and collect more feedback, and then support for digital optical monitoring.58:30If you're, if you have fiber optic transceivers. So we've introduced in service software upgrades, and you can manage that directly from the cloud, Allows you to upgrade, allows you to essentially schedule your firmware upgrade while your switch is up and running online and still forwarding packets.58:49Just a much more efficient way of, of doing your firmware upgrades if you're interested in that.59:09So new cloud features starting from 1718 two, cloud management with iOS XE. We've bundled we've rolled out cloud managed EVPN fabric, so if you're wanting to manage your switches and scale across your infrastructure, you're able to take advantage of that feature.59:17Of course we have smart ports automation, gateway redundancy with warm spare support, and then USC allow list as well. And I'll hand this back to Jason so we can start our live Q and A session if you have any live questions for us.59:36Yeah, absolutely. It looks like all the questions are answered in the Slido. Let me just copy and paste the Cisco live links I discussed earlier.59:55If you wanna look at those, let me while we wait here for a second.01:00:13Yeah a little space between that for everyone, and then let me also upload a few more links for you. While I do that, if anyone, you know, has a question and wants to ask it live, go ahead. You could raise your hand and we'll unmute you and we could do.01:00:29Do that.01:00:48Oh, just 1 s here. I think someone asked for the presentation or references for cloud and we'll, we'll be happy to share that information as well.01:00:50Yeah, so I put I just uploaded, you should see, I don't know if you saw a pop up or in the three dots and then content section. I uploaded a PDF with a bunch of links there. Amazing. So you'll have that and then I.01:01:09In the chat are the links to the Cisco Live kind of presentations that I talked about earlier because they're not in the PDF. Also if you're interested in registering for upcoming sessions, the links are there. Also the link for the recordings.01:01:25I'm not sure exactly how long it takes if it's a week or two or maybe you know about that to get this recording uploaded, but we've done this session in the past, so you'll be able to see that as well. And then the kind of the link to the customer success resource center so you can find different guides, videos, virtual events.01:01:42All that information is there let me just check back I don't see any new questions in Slido I don't see any hands raised or anything in chat, so, if you have any questions now's a great time to ask him. We're here.01:02:02Happy to answer anything you have.01:02:20I looks like we don't have anybody with any questions, we must have a good job.01:02:40Oh. All right, cool. Well, let's we'll give another minute or two, see if anyone wants to raise their hand or have something in the Slido. Again, i'll leave the Slido up for.01:02:46Another two weeks. If you have any questions or anything, please feel free to pop your question in there. I'll check that out. On top of that, very good if you, if you're looking digging for references on top of the references that we provide you.01:03:03If you go to dashboard.Meraki.com, we have a good breakdown of like documentation per device type, so if you want to explore, you know, the technical documentation, feel free to have dashboard.meraki.com under your belts for your resources.01:03:23Alright, well, I don't want to hold anyone else up for the day so if you have any questions go pop those in there and in the slider we'll check it out throughout the week here and next week. Just thank you again for your time.01:03:39Appreciate it and reach out if you have any questions. Have a good afternoon, everyone. Have an amazing day.01:03:54