Cisco Catalyst Center 3.x SW/Platform upgrade

Good morning, good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining today for this session. Like Sumit mentioned, my name is and I'm a technical marketing engineer.00:10In the catalyst center and Meraki network platform BU and with me is Gayathri debbie. She's also a technical marketing engineer in my team, she's my colleague, and we also have Shy and Peter as our panelists, so if there are any questions you might have, please put that in chat. We'll also have some time towards the end and we can take them.00:20Are live as well.00:40So today's session is very interesting. It is the brand new catalyst center three.X of features, three.one.X features and what's new and what, what amazing things we are bringing with the three.one.X capabilities on catalyst center. So we are very excited to be here and show you guys all of those capabilities. So we'll 1st.00:41Start with a value of catalyst center for so for anyone who's new and.01:01Has not yet seen all the amazing things catalyst center can do. We'll just start you off with, of the why somebody would choose catalyst center and all the capabilities around, all the different personas that we are gonna drill down into further, which is the network platforms, the the that actually is responsible to bring up.01:07And automate and configure devices and then AI ops, for assurance for your visibility and troubleshooting, and then sec secops, which is our security personas that is responsible for securing our network end to end both for our guests and for our employees and for IoT devices. So though that's where secops come in the middle.01:26And also how catasenter is DevOps capable where it's a built open APIs, webhooks, and all of the integrations like ServiceNow, so all of that is also done with cater center. So we'll dive into basically what cater center is, why it's needed, and then what improvements and new capabilities we are adding.01:46In three.one.X and three is gonna go over all of those towards the end. So I'll I'll start you guys off with.02:06The 1st few by catalyst center to the platform improvement updates and then guy three will do the rest of the personas. Alright, so 1st of all, how do we, how does catalyst center help, network admin, and how is it driven with AI in mind all the.02:13Throughout, right? So 1st of all Catalyssandra is.02:33It's built for making our lives simpler where we are going away from manually configuring our network. It's a intent based networking controller orchestrator where you can define your, what are you trying to build once and then scale out to thousands of sites and devices. So that's the entire goal.02:37And we do that across, configuration, across security and also across assurance. So for.02:56And we have AI built for all three of them. So for like security we have endpoint analytics. So what that means is whenever an endpoint joins your network with using AI and the telemetry that's coming from the endpoints, we can quickly identify whether the traffic that the endpoint is sending is, is, is a secured, is a, is a valid.03:05Or is a hackers traffic, and we can quickly point out those using endpoint analytics. Then for assurance, we have had AI built in in data centers since 2018. We build a map for the customers according of their own network. So we know two networks are the same, NO two spikes in the network.03:25Are the same, so we build a baseline of your traffic and then if and only if there's a spike from that baseline using AI, we let you know that there is a deviation that you might want to look into. So.03:45Moving on, we know, this is all of this is needed to move at a speed of scale for scale at the speed of light, right? Because so many devices are getting added to our network, Wi Fi six, Wi Fi six, wi Fi seven, all of them are getting added to our network, and every persona that is coming into our network is bringing more than three.03:59Two four devices, so that is intense amount of workload a network admin has to do and also catch some personas who are not doing the right activities. So catalyst center gives you that provisioning or or pushing of the configuration simplicity at scale. It also gives you assurance.04:19And troubleshooting at scale, and so does it it gives you 1st security as well. So those are the three or four personas that we have really captured and with the with the scale, immense scale of the business. And also.04:39We know customer, there are customers who have deployment all across the globe, so they might have a campus somewhere in the US on the east coast. They might have some branches all over the United States, they might have some presence in Europe and Asia Pacific. So they might need more than one catas center.04:56So we have also built the manager of manager of cater centers, which is a CCGM or the cather center global manager. So we're gonna go over that as well. So let's start with the capabilities around assurance. So I was mentioning before with catalyst center, you are now able to see.05:13The AI driven insights for not only your, the network devices, and your traffic patterns but also your site level AI insights. So we can compare two sites health and let you know what, if one side is performing well and other site is not performing well, we can quickly let you know.05:33What might, could be a reason why this site is not performing well? It could be your AAA transactions might be going, might be failing. So it will point you out to the AAA server that might be having problem. So you can quickly do comparisons between multiple sites. We can also build, he.05:52Heatmaps around what are the most utilized access points in my network. And if there is a deviation from if the access point was able to handle 2000 clients a day and if it now stops and now it's only doing 500, we can see that deviation and we will let you know, we'll create an alert and let you know the.06:12That there is a deviation and you should look into that. So all that is analytics is happening using AI to help customers troubleshoot faster.06:32We also have, we're also giving you visibility for your traffic that is going outside of your network, which is going to the WAN through applications like Cisco Webex Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Office or any other endpoint on the WAN side. So using thousand eyes and using agents that can be.06:41Run on our switching architecture on, on the catalyst nine case or I 35 hundreds, we can now perform end to end tests for the LAN and the WAN and give you an idea whether if a problem is related to your LAN or if it is outside on the WAN side. So you can quickly identify the problem and fix it.07:01So all this is gonna do is it's gonna save hours and hours of troubleshooting from the customer's perspective and give you more time to do things better and give a better customer experience. And we are also work closely with Apple, Samsung and Intel, and we are using their analytics directly into catalyst center and showcasing you.07:21How these endpoints, if it's an Apple phone or a Samsung or an Intel laptop, how their experience is connecting to our access points. So all that can be achieved just from the use of data center and Cisco devices. So definitely a lot of cool things over there. Now, I was mentioning security, security is built for.07:41From day one in building cater center your network through cater center. And we do that by multiple things. So 1st of all, we have SD access where when you 1st start to build your network in with with SD access, we can segment your traffic into IoT devices or into your employee traffic.08:01Like or your guest traffic so that they are separated out with virtual networks or vrfs. So we know that anybody is able to log into your IoT network is not able to bleed into the other side of the network. So customers have the peace of mind that any hacker I'm protected from because I've already segmented my network using.08:21And with center you don't need to figure out the lines of code of CLI that is, needs to be pushed to achieve these things. We have already done all the leg work from our years of Cisco experience and once you identify that I want to make this intent, we push out all the configuration to the rest of the devices. Then we have.08:41Also brought a construct of, security group based access list. So what that means is we have been used to creating access using IP address, which can be confusing. And over time, it might be hard to identify why that access list was created.09:01So with group based access list, we can give you a group name, like an employee or a guest or a IoT device and then create access list based on groups. Like employees is allowed to talk to a IoT device, but guest does not. So when you do that, it doesn't matter what IP address a guest gets or an employee gets, they are segmented.09:17Right off the bat and the access list is based on group and created right off the bat.09:37We have other things like endpoint analytics, which I touched on before. We have eyes for posturing to identify the user's authentication and authorization in the network. And we have a lot of security patches always available in cater center for any, any of the issues that might be going on in your network devices.09:42Alright, so this was the basics. This was what catalyst center is and the value that it provides for anyone who has not, looked at catalyst center use cases. Now let's jump into what new features we are bringing into three.one.x. So from the platform side, which is the catalyst center as a platform, we started off.10:02With servers into server, and.10:22Well with the servers, we had three sizes. We had a medium, we had large and X excel. And you can also like we can you can also combine three of them using three node Excel or and giving you much larger scale. So besides the server, we also went to AWS Center available.10:27On public clouds like AWS, private clouds like ESXi, so with the three.one.X we have we now catalyst centers available on Azure. And going forward we are also bringing in other form factors. So stay tuned for that. We are also bringing features like side based role based access control. So we used to have our back or role based access control for quite some.10:47Time, but now you can do site based for any user where you can allow a user to be an admin for certain site observer for all the other sites based on your needs. And we are gonna do a live demo of this as well as we go on with the guy three session. Then we also have a.11:07A global management which I was talking about for if a customer has more than one catas center.11:27They can and they will have to go to individual center and see the alerts and issues going on in their cathy center and also be able to figure out where is my endpoint or device connected to. Now we have this manager of manager, which can either be.11:32Hosted by a customer or you can also connect to Meraki, which is cisco's hosted enterprise networking solution. You can also add your catalyst center to the Meraki global overview. And then my favorite part is we also have AI assistant now available on the three.one.X capability. So either if you're on catalyst center.11:48So that gives you a very big reason for you to join or migrate to three.one.x, because AI assistance LLM is now gonna be baked into center where you in in You can ask questions around how's my network doing? What are clients issues that are going on? How do I fix those? How do I troubleshoot those?12:08And like I was saying before, our years of experience that we have built around networking with Cisco, all of that is being put into this AI assistance knowledge base. So definitely a very important part to be part of x. Then for our networking operations persona, which are.12:28Responsible for bringing up devices, making sure the configurations are intact, making sure that the the software upgrade is, is done for all of my network devices. We have a lot of new capabilities that we are adding. We have now, you can bring in a brownfield switch onto catask center and we will learn the configuration.12:48Version of the brownfield switch.13:08Earlier, we, you had to start from scratch, but now we can even consume the configuration that is coming from brownfield, device, any network, any switch that you can add to your network. We also have a new dashboard for swim. We also have rule based compliance. This was a pro loved feature from our Cisco prime.13:10Where now you can do a pattern match for a configuration and if if if any time on your thousands of devices, that line of configuration goes away.13:30The compliance check will let you know and it can also bring it back to your networking devices. So that is the powers of rule based compliance that we have brought. We have campus network automation, which and all of these guys will also go over in detail, but these are some of the cool things that we are building, and just wanted to give you a highlight.13:40For AI ops, but we also have the energy management dashboard that we are going over. We also have event analytics outlier capabilities that we are bringing. And we also have the thousand eyes agent workflow also coming in with the 31X.14:00For the secops with the SD access, we have some new capabilities for pubsub, for some voice VLANs and also for, of overlapping IP pools or some capabilities that we have brought. And again, like every release, we keep adding APIs, we keep adding API enhancements for the, for the personas that don't wanna go into the center down.14:17Dashboard and click, but they want to build their own tool that utilizes APIs and, and programmatically creates their all of these personas that we just showed you visibility, configuration, security, everything can be done via API, so a lot of work is also being done over there. Alright, so now let's jump into a little bit more.14:37More detail on the platform side of things. So as I was mentioning before, we have already centers already available on public clouds like AWS and private clouds like ESXi. So now with this release, we also are on Microsoft Azure, which was much needed, much requested features from a lot of our customers.14:57And it, the, the pain point it tries to solve is you don't need to wait for days and weeks to, get your catast center delivered. Quickly in less than an hour, you can build something on my a public cloud like Azure and AWS, which can accelerate the value, time to value. It can give you flexibility to do.15:17Deploy anywhere on the globe and be able to support your networking devices, which is massive. You don't need a data center, you can be anywhere. It's very easy to deploy. You don't need to figure out the network interfaces between enterprise and management and cluster. It's just one single interface. We give you an armed template from Cisco, which is which has all the information that.15:37Catalyst center needs. You don't even need to go through the maglev CLI configuration. Once you plug that armed template into Azure, in, and you go for a cup of coffee, you come back in a couple, in an hour and your catalyst center is up and ready for adding your discovering your network devices.15:57The specs is still a medium flavor of catalyst center, which is 32 virtual cores, 02:36 GB RAM and three TB of storage that can get you a scale of medium appliance of catalyst center. Alright, so for the upgrade capabilities, we have, we know.16:14We have for any customers who are on two.three.X release, we have created a very guided workflow to get you upgraded to three.X release. This is a a major jump that we have done, not just with the release numbering but also on the back end. The Ubuntu OS.16:34It has been like upgraded to the latest so that it takes away the complexity to be on a version which is older. And so it has required underlying infrastructure change which needs us to convert a backup of your two.three.X and then to take you to the three.X version. So if you need any help.16:54Up there we'll share a link in the chat to migrate you from two.three to three.X definitely use that. Our team is available to help you and to get you to upgrade to the three.X version, which will give you all of these capabilities that we are doing in the session today.17:14Alright, so site based, we touched on this a little bit, but this is where we brought in a new construct in role based access control, which is called the access group. And access group is nothing but it's a mix of a role which is like a super admin or a network admin or an observer role, and which are.17:31Customer can create a custom role as well saying, like we are showing about where a user if it needs a right access to the assurance data, but for security you just needs an observer, so you can create that role.17:51And then you can choose your sites, and then that will create an access group. And now this access group can be now add a user can be now added to that access group. So what that does is a user can be part of multiple access groups, where, so at that time so whenever a.18:04User logs in, it will see those personas. It will see it can, it can swap between those multiple access groups and become a super admin of one site and an observer of the other site. So that is the site based role based access control capability that we are, that we are bringing with the three.one.X capability, so this is.18:24Another very like feature that was really requested by our customers, so this is finally available on the three.one.X alright so now we are gonna jump into the manager of manager of cathy centers. So.18:44For any customers who have more than one catalyst center, we have two ways for you to manage them. One is you can attach them to the Meraki's global overview, and this is not very common knowledge by a lot of customers but cisco's SaaS solution, which is Meraki has a construct of global overview where it was able to.18:58Add all of your organizations, Meraki organizations in the past, we can now add Catalyst Center as an organization also. So what, what this will allow you to do is it will allow you to get visibility across your Meraki and catalyst center all from one place. And for customers who do not have a Meraki, you can still.19:18Create a free Meraki account and add your Catas centers right to the Meraki global overview as well.19:38Now 2nd option option is for you to deploy your own virtual machine of catasenter global manager. So this is for customers who do not have, who do not wanna, who, who have the requirement to keep all the data on prem, so you can have your center global Manager VM run and it's gonna do basically the same thing, it's gonna.19:46Give you visibility across your network. You can do global search for your network devices, clients, you can get your own whole device infrastructure inventory. You can see your fabric and non fabric health of your entire network all through the global manager.20:05And the feature set is gonna be exactly the same as we are building into both of those platforms. So it doesn't matter which platform you choose Both are gonna be able to manage your multiple catalyst center. So with the CCGM, which is the on prem virtual machine, we have added support for AWS cloud as well.20:21Earlier it used to be just be available on VMware ESXi. Now you can bring in your CCGM on AWS cloud as well. And a new capability that we have added with the three.one.X with the 141 release is now you can take catalyst centers backups also from CCGM or the catalyst center global manager. So at.20:42Still you can define your backup schedule and and and either a daily or a weekly backup for automation and assurance data.21:01And you can schedule all of this from right here. We have shared some links here, which are easy to write cS.CO/CCGM. If you wanted any help to see how to onboard, how to download, how to install, deploy, and feature set of CCGM. So please take a look at that URL and link. On the Meraki global overview side.21:11Again, like I mentioned, the feature set will look exactly the same as CCGM and now with the Meraki, you will besides your Meraki organization, you'll also start seeing catalyst centers and any of the network devices that are in poor health will be seen right there.21:31You can also do a global search for your network devices and clients that are residing on prem on cathy center right from the Meraki dashboard. So that's another feature that customers can, deploy and use. And to make it happen, like I was mentioned before, you can create a free account on meraki.com if you're not a Meraki.21:47Customer today. You need to be on catalyst center 23710 or higher with internet connectivity so you can reach the Meraki dashboard. And as long as you has have more than one organization, you'll see global overview feature and with that you can add a organization which is a catalyst center organization.22:08Alright, so the final one I want to touch on is the AI assistant before I hand it off to Kaithree. So I was mentioning that AI assistant is now LLM, the last language model, is now built into catalyst center, starting 23711 and 316 releases. What that is gonna allow you to do is it's gonna allow you to ask.22:27Questions to your network, instead of looking throughout the pages, and those questions can be anywhere around issues for my clients, for my sites, any other troubleshooting for my clients or network devices that I want to do. What it is, what it does is on the backend, we have our Cisco's.22:47Models that we have trained with all of our experience of years of tech experience and then we have the MCP tools that have the right APIs of catalyst centers. So we do create a plan for any of your questions that you send to that model. It, it it creates a.23:07It sends the right message to the MCP server to ask at the center for those questions or or get those responses. It aggregates that into a nice formatted answer and then pushes that answer out to you. You can ask in a very large, it's a large language, so you can ask in a very human language, and it's good it's.23:27Will be, it also retains context so that you can keep answer, keep asking more and more questions. It will, it'll, it's smart enough to realize and know what you're asking about. So again, your you can ask questions around clients, your switching, your routing, your wireless devices, you can ask, hey, what are my top APs that are having poor RF health? What are my worst performing APs?23:46And then you can go, hey, troubleshoot this AP name, right? Or troubleshoot this IP address of a networking device or client, and it's gonna give you the suggested action and list from right there. Many customers who have tested this come back to us and say they have saved immense amount of time not having to go troubleshoot using cather center, they can now ask the.24:06LLM the question, the AA system the question. So please definitely give this a try.24:26You can ask compliance, non compliance questions, you can ask questions like, hey, might this client, what networking device is it connected to? And what is that configuration port configuration of that switch? So we can give you those level of details as well. You can ask if my, all of my devices are running golden image on software image management on catalyst center or not.24:31And if it is not, how, how can I identify and fix those?24:51And again, now with this, customers who have tested this say that they have stopped reading our user guides admin guides, they can just ask AI assistant documentation questions and AI assistant can point them to the right direction on how to execute or configure something, how to troubleshoot something. So definitely very cool feature that is coming in three.1.24:55Next, we are very excited for you to try this. All right, now we move on to the network ops persona and at this time I will hand it off to Gaitri. Gathri, please take it over. Thank you so much. Thank you. Yep. Up next is our net ops persona.25:15We'll begin with a few enhancements before we delve into whatever we are introducing a fresh in 31X So 1st while in the prior catalyst center releases, you've had to navigate between multiple pages to see, how your discovery jobs have been doing.25:33And whether or not you were able to add all of those devices that you intended to do. Now we made that part of the discovery dashboard itself from right from where you can take a look at the scheduled discoveries and the results of these discoveries. That is a minor yet useful enhancement there.25:52The next one is, being able to add devices right from one page from having to navigate between multiple discovery tools regardless of whether you want to add, if you had to add one single device, you had to navigate to inventory and add a device. If you were to import devices again, it was inventory.26:12But if you were to run a discovery job, again, it was a discovery dashboard. Moving away from all of these multiple interfaces, we have consolidated them into one onboarding devices workflow where regardless of whether you want to add a single device, you want to run a discovery job or import multiple device.26:31Devices in bulk. This will be your go to interface starting from 31X onwards.26:51Another anticipated enhancement I'd say is being able to add, additional VLAN IDs apart from the, for the native VLAN and add more VLAN IDs as allowed VLANs for your switches for the trunk ports.26:59Now this has been more sought after we're handling this in starting 31X now again. If you're an Avid user of software upgrades using catalyst center, you might know the pain of having to navigate between multiple interfaces. From.27:16From selecting the latest and greatest software image version for a device family marking it golden tagged under image repository and then having to navigate to provision to identify which of these devices require an update. If or not, they are ready, if there are failures for upgrade readiness checks, having to now.27:35Having to deal with those failures before you can even select multiple devices and run a software image upgrade regardless of whether it is copying an image to the device or activating it. Now, we've consolidated all of that.27:54Brought to your fresh new look to handling software image upgrades. So the software image management, that page or dashboard on the provision menu is your go to now going forward. On on this dashboard, you'll see multiple tabs beginning with the overview, giving you an overview of how software.28:09Where images in your network are doing, how many of them? How many of your devices are, having a.28:29Golden image tagged, how many are not having those? How many of your devices that have a golden image tagged are ready for upgrades? What is the status of the upgrades that you've triggered in the past? What happened to the image copies and image activates? All of this is summarized in.28:35A clean overview there, and then you have the images, devices and updates sections individually covering, providing you detailed information about each of these. Whether you want, if you want to upgrade devices, those are those that are ready for update, meaning all the readiness checks are ticked off.28:53They have a golden image tagged, you know what version to upgrade them to? You simply click on the tile ready for update under devices dashlet, which takes you to the list of all devices that are, that have to be upgraded to the golden version and are ready for upgrade. You simply select those devices, select the execution.29:13So whether you want to go by parallel order, if you have a hierarchical structure, whether you want to go the sequential way and.29:33Schedule a job. So all of those tasks right from within one page, that's as simple as you can go with software image upgrades. Yet another but most sought after feature, especially if you've been a prime user I'd say is the ability to identify if your device is.29:40Are missing a piece of configuration or who changed it. Now auditing a huge enterprise network can be daunting especially if you don't have an automated tool to run an audit job to identify if some of your devices are missing parts of the golden or standard configuration.30:00Rule based compliance is our answer to all of those questions or all of those overhead you've been having so far. Rule based compliance is equal to compliance policies in prime. So this lets you create custom configuration audit policies.30:19It lets you define the scope of these audits, whether you want to, what device families you want to audit if there's a specific software version type that you want to audit for, and at the next level lets you define what you're looking for.30:38In these devices, whether it is a device parameter information, whether you want looking for a snippet in the running configuration, if you're looking for a nested value in the running configuration and so on and so forth. Now you can define all of that in a rule based compliance policy.30:54Tell catalyst center what to do when it either detects the presence or absence of these configuration snippets. It lets you raise a violation, define what the custom violation message should be, allows you to also customize what severity this violation should be. Ranging from five different severity.31:14Levels.31:34So when you have a violation detected, the next step would be for you to remediate it. So that is something that we're working on for a future release after 31X In 31X you'll be able to map rule based compliance policies to a group of devices in a specific site and either let Catalyst Center run the check.31:35In an automated fashion once a week or do it manually for the selected devices that you want to run them ad hoc. Campus network automation, yet another major leap and have you handle brownfield configuration. Catalyst Center.31:551st while being an intent based networking solution, let you manage your network by mapping them to hierarchic hierarchical logical constructs called sites. Now, for those of you that wanted to move away from the default sites that you've created and want to manage or.32:14Ultimately, the diverse sites and devices across multiple geographies.32:34Campus Network automation is our answer to you. Now campus network automation lets you manage devices across multiple sites by the use of network devices and device groups. So it lets you create a particular network, map multiple geographical sites to them, create device.32:39These groups by selecting one or more devices from across these sites.32:59And going a step further, it also lets you create network custom network groups, sorry, custom network profiles for these device groups. Now, in prior catalyst center releases, network profiles were always mapped to specific sites. Now that you have a liberty of creating your own custom network by.33:05Mapping multiple device groups to it. You also can go a step forward, create your own, network profiles or custom profile, device profiles.33:25Those that are for L2L3 and security features, you can create those profiles, map them to the device groups, and as a next step, you can go ahead and compare the configuration of these device groups with your.33:36Network profile and see if there's a mismatch. Now in the next series of slides, I'm gonna walk you through exactly what campus network automation is capable of doing. So as you can look at the screen captures, it lets you create a network, map multiple sites.33:53Select different devices from these sites and create a network. Subsequently, you'll be able to assign these devices to the device groups. The next step in further being able to manage configuration efficiently, you can add a device group.34:10Profile for layer two, layer three or security profile, security configuration.34:30You create a group profile, map it to these devices. So when you create a profile, you can go, go deep into specifying what configuration you want.34:35Enabled or disabled in these group profiles, map them to the devices, and in the next step, also be able to select specific devices, compare these devices with the.34:50Group profiles and see if there is a mismatch. So here you simply go ahead select those devices, say compare configuration catalyst center will pull out a report stating how many of these devices.35:06Comply with the device profile, the group profile and how many differ. When they differ, it also tells you what is the mismatch in these devices. So that is an awful way of handling.35:22Brownfield configuration. Moving on, we have a few enhancements in, the per device managing single device configuration using campus network automation for wireless devices. Starting with AB priming, the ability to configure.35:38The primary, secondary and tertiary wireless LAN controllers.35:57Two, a series of enhancements in handling global wireless configuration. Now these knob based intuitive I'm sorry, intuitive knobs let you turn on or off certain global wireless LAN configurations.36:03And makes it very seamless for you to handle per device configuration. These are a series of enhancements that we've rolled out.36:19In version 31X And we also had it network setting enhancements for SNMP V three user groups, DHCP persistence, some admin enhancements here in handling IP routing.36:34FTP SFTP settings and user administration. There's also the enhancement that lets you clone configuration supported for wireless LAN profiles policy profiles, and AP join profiles. This is available starting version 31X onwards.36:53The next segment that I would want to walk you through is the improvements or innovation that we've rolled out in AI ops persona. I'd like to start with the energy management dashboard. Now, 1st of all in the prior releases of.37:13Catalyst Center, we did not have a comprehensive visibility about the power consumption, but for the AP connected interfaces and the PoE dashlet. Now the energy management dashlet offers insights into the energy consumption patterns in your network.37:27It enables you more, make more strategic energy management decisions, allows you to monitor and optimize operational costs and the carbon footprint of your network. This dashboard itself has a lot of dashlets beginning with energy.37:45Consumption and carbon emissions. So you can leverage this dashboard.38:05To optimally plan your OpEx. The next one is some enhancement to the thousand Eyes integration workflow. Starting 31X, you'll be able to install and manage thousand eyes agents on.38:11Switches right from within the health application dashboard. So as you can see, this is a series of steps. The 1st one requiring you to connect thousand eyes agent with Catalyst Center, and then select applications that you want to monitor, select locations.38:30That you want to monitor performance for, and then you can also get to the level of selecting specific switches where you want to install the agents and monitor your applications. One another.38:46Improvement in the visibility that we provide you is in prior catalyst center releases when an endpoint had onboarding failure, we draw we navigate to client three 60 to identify what was the cause of this onboarding failure, and when it was related to ICE authentication issues, you had to so.39:02Yep, you had to navigate between ICE and catalyst center to identify what exactly caused ICE authentication.39:22Failure for the onboarding to not work. Now starting three one next, we are also providing the this specific insight right within client three 60 degree view. When your client or endpoint fails to onboard because of ICE authentication failure, you can drill down right from within client three 60 to identify what exactly.39:29Caused the failure in onboarding.39:49So as you can see, you see the top eyes failure reasons right here and you'll be able to identify what is the exact cause of onboarding failure. Yet another announcement we've brought about is being able to use the AI outliers for event analytics.39:51This is available under syslog analytics on the events and issues and events dashboard page. Those buildings that have an increasing event volume for those buildings, you will be.40:11Able to identify outliers using the sand key charts that are available starting 31X For those of you that are using ServiceNow as an ITSM tool to integrate with Catalyst Center for closed loop automation.40:24We now have bi directional integration for assurance issues in starting 31X So you'll be able to directly launch ServiceNow incident ticket from within the issue wizard right here and you can close back on it.40:41Using the closed loop automation here. Finally, on the DevOps front, we have a host of new APIs that we support starting 31XA few of these APIs we've also had updated their versions here. So feel free to take a look at the platform, developer guide to.41:00For demo for more detailed information about what these are, that brings us to the end of this presentation. I'll pause here Someeth if you should take questions up here. Perfect, thank Youry and.41:20I see a lot of.41:40Great questions coming in in the chat and I believe we are, the team is doing a great job answering them as well. Let me see if there is any specific question that hasn't been answered or anyone in the anyone if you have any questions really you can raise your hand and I will.41:41Unmute you so that you can also ask your question live there's an option to raise your hand directly.42:01From the UI everybody, so if you have a question that we haven't answered yet, please feel free to raise your hand.42:20Right, I see a hand raised, I have.42:40Send a request. You can, you can go, you can ask a question, you're unmuted. Yeah hi, good evening everyone. So and we are in the 2.3 .7 point eleven version, so it is already I think you you mentioned it is already enabled.42:43But we are unable to open the even it is just showing over there what we are unable to use it actually. That is the main question for staff. Yep. I can I can help with that so there is one step that you will need to do to get the 237I mean the AI assistant working is in your settings.43:03Page there is a, there is a catalyst cloud page where you need to register your to the to the Cisco's cloud entity where the AI assistant is actually.43:23Setting. So once you do that, it will make your catalyst center will make that connection to the AI assistant and then it will start working. So in your setting there's a catalyst cloud page. Just go there and if you register, then the AI assistant will start working from there.43:34And we can share the documentation as well that explains how to do that. Did that, did that answer your question? I've got it and I understood that. Okay. And I'm posting that on the chat right now.43:51Now the EI assistant enablement flow.44:11Okay, we have two questions, two two more people who wants to ask a question. Scott, I'll let you go 1st. Yeah, so we're working diligently at getting ServiceNow integration working, and it seems to be a good.44:17Great way to bring assets into ServiceNow. Is there any possibility of being able to bring in like our nexus or ftds through Catalyst Center just for the integration perspective?44:37So we do already have some Nexuses that are supported like in our compatibility matrix if you saw, is there any particular versions of Nexus you're looking for? We're pretty much 93 hundreds.44:54Okay, and I just have two, you know, four devices total, so it seems like overkill to try and get to Nexus dashboard when things are fairly static. Yeah. Yeah, I'm trying to look at our compatibility matrix for nexuses. The 93.45:10And 1809 3369 3329 3108 or 9364, all of those are, should be supported on the caller center.45:30On three one correct both on 237 and three one. Oh, ok. That's new cool. Yeah, thank you. Yep yep you got it. And I'm gonna share the compatibility matrix also on the chat so you can take a look.45:43Yeah thank you. Yep. All right, we have with the next question? Hi team, good morning, good evening. I, I do have a very simple question that was asked.46:05Ask just just a while ago regarding the AI which is AI assistant which is available. What we have faced on 23711 is whenever we are signing in using the ICE authentication, it's already integrated. The credentials.46:25That we are using of or using the ICE, it doesn't work. But if we log out from ICE authentication or, and then try to log in using the local admin, the AI assistant works. Oh. So.46:43Yeah, I don't really mean this to be a troubleshooting session, but more like any suggestions that you have. I think we might have to take this back to our engineering and see if this is a known problem or tested validated issue or not. It doesn't It shouldn't matter how you are logging in.46:58Maybe it might require a bounce of the Catalyst cloud connection. Maybe I I don't know if you have already tried to deregister with Catalyst Cloud and try to register, there was a.47:18Bug we are aware of in the past where the service would hang of the assistant for for some reason maybe try to just bounce that connection, deregister and register again and see if that is helping or else we can validate on our end also and let you know if there is any follow up, if there is any actual bug or issue going on over there.47:28With the external auth, but it should not be. Right, I mean, I although I didn't really try deregistering it because of the fact that when we are signing in using the local it is working perfectly fine. That is correct. You're right, you're right then then it it cannot be that problem.47:48Yeah, yeah, I think we'll have to get back to you on that. If there's a way for us to reach you, please let us know. But yeah, we'll we'll check with our engineering and get back to you. That's a, that's a Yeah, please. Sure. I hope that should not be the case with the three.one.X versions, I believe.48:07Because I haven't yet tried it. It should it should not be for us the the 23711 as well but yeah because external auth and local auth both should be working for AI system, but, but yeah, we'll.48:28I'll I'll confirm and I'll get back to you. Got it. Got it. Thank you. Appreciate it. You got it. No problem. Thank you. Thank you. All right, I believe Scott you had a question?48:40Or did that get answered? I threw it in there in chat, but it's, with the integration with ICE, is there a way to actually default catalyst center locations or types, when it's creating that new device in ICE based upon like doing a plug and player.49:01Whatever. We do some of our authentication based upon what the location or the device type is kind of that role based access kind of a thing. Is there a way to set that?49:21By default within catalyst center when it's creating that new device. No, I think ICE configuration still has to be on the ICE level. The group based access control matrix can be configured on the catalyst center.49:32And then that same matrix of allow or deny gets pushed to ICE and then from ICE, the CTS rules gets pushed out to network devices. So if you are asking for any administration or configuration of the ICE itself, that will have to be done on the ICE today, and the.49:50But the policy side can be done on the cather center.50:10And, and, and be shared, that matrix can be shared with the ice. Okay, thank you. Yep, you got it alright we have about four.50:145 min. Any other questions from anyone, you can always raise your hand and.50:34Ask the question alright?50:39We will be sharing the slides and the recording of today's session on the email that you registered with. I think overall, there's a lot of value of moving to the three.X software version, a lot of capabilities that that you get.50:58Is there any guidance from your side to the team while 31X is now available? I know there's a lot of work, great work happening to for the next versions 32323 and three and beyond. So any recommendations from your side on when should a customer.51:15Customer go to 31X right now versus shall they wait and for how long et cetera.51:34So so the the guidance I would give is if you really want to go launch on Azure, and you have a time pressure, or are you really looking to right now play with site based RBAC the rule based compliance?51:39I would say that you can go ahead and, upgrade to 316. Oh, there's a question in the window here the 31232 will be an in place upgrade. So that is that I mean that is not a problem. But now we do have three two, which is in F.51:57CS date, so we're currently testing the the deployment and that's going to become GA here in the next month or two. So to minimize having to do multiple upgrades, if you're not in a, in a pressure point, and then to minimize having to do multiple upgrades, you can go ahead and.52:16Wait for 323 to become GA. I will tell you that three one the three one train will not have a recommended release. The three two is planned to become a recommended release.52:36Awesome. That is very helpful, and three two recommended release will tentatively be by end of the year and end of the calendar year.52:52We would like that, but the I mean it's hard for me to say yes or NO. In order for a release to become recommended, we need a certain amount of adoption, and we need to make sure all the all the KPIs are met for to qualify for documented release, so it's not so much a time function.53:06As much as a combination of adoption and quality that need to be met.53:24But ideally we would like to see that around end of the year, beginning of 2027. But, like I said, it's not a time bounder, it's more of a KPI bound. Awesome.53:31All right.53:50Any additional questions from the team before we close the call? Last call for any questions? We, I have one thing is, I think we're gonna go ahead. I'm gonna go ahead and post this, but if you want to, to get support to migrate from two three to three two, we do have a.53:54Form that could be filled out to request access and we do have also white glove. I'm gonna go ahead and post the link to request the migration support and this will give you their early access to two three before before it goes GA.54:14Yeah Perfect. I see a question from Can we test 32X in our lab and give feedback? So.54:33Absolutely. Go ahead and and do the request form that I posted below, and then once we have that information, we, we can go ahead and help you get access to it.54:47Perfect. All right, then with that we will end our session today. Again, we will share the slides and recording with everyone. Thank you Shy and team for joining. This was very helpful and thank you everyone for joining. Have a good day. Bye all.55:03