Cisco IQ Fundamentals: Contracts and Data Connectors

I'll right, well, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everyone. Thanks for joining us today for our part two of Cisco IQ fundamentals series. Today we're talking about.00:01Contracts and data connectors. I'd also like to extend a warm welcome to our panelists today. We have Jackie Peter Dan, and Adam. They're gonna be here to help with your questions and.00:20Speaking of which hopefully everybody saw on the way into today's meeting, we're using Slido for Q and A So if you wouldn't mind, if you haven't logged in already, go ahead and grab a shot of that QR code, the passcode being lowercase Cisco IQ.00:32And then just some housekeeping items before we get started. 1st of all, all microphones have been muted for your comfort and the comfort of others. Again, the Slido is open. If your, if your Slido is not opening for you, there should be an icon at the bottom of your screen to open that up. One note about the Slido, we do have two things in there to keep track of. One is the Q and A panel, the other is a short.00:49Survey or a short poll, just a one question poll to gauge where you are on your Cisco IQ journey.01:09You'll also find chats at the bottom of your screen. Now chat has been somewhat disabled in that it's only for talking to the panelists directly. We'd ask that you not use that for Q and A, but if you happen to have a technical issue throughout today's session, if you want to go ahead and put that in chat, one of our panelists will do their best to assist you there. If you're interested in closed captioning, you'll find that on the bottom left side of your screen.01:15The hand raise feature has been disabled, the reactions are there if you'd like to use them. And then just to note that today's session is being recorded and you will get a copy of the recording immediately following today's session. It'll also be posted to our community ask me anything page along with today's presentation materials and more information about that toward the end of today's session.01:36And then immediately following today's call, you'll also get a very brief qui five question survey. We'd ask that you please take that seriously, do you give us your feedback, and that's how we make these sessions better. So thank you in advance for participating there. Alright, so let's level set on the Cisco IQ fundamentals series. So.01:55Jackie did a tremendous job for us last week kicking off the features and capabilities session. Today is a continuation and this whole series builds on each each of the the individual sessions. So today we're gonna start talking about how we actually get your data into Cisco IQ.02:15Okay, and we're gonna look at a couple of those ways today with contracts and with specifically cloud connectors, we say data connectors, but specifically cloud connectors and certainly more to come on that. The one that we're not gonna talk about today in depth is Cisco IQ link. So next week we're gonna go very deep into the deploying Cisco IQ link. And then we'll round out the whole.02:32Series with the turning insights into action, which is which is kind of a fun one where we look at some, maybe.02:52Real ish, use cases. So it'll be a good one to to capture as well. But if you haven't registered for the other sessions, go ahead and grab a shot of this QR code and we look forward to seeing you on future sessions. Now, two other things I want to call out real quick about today's session in particular.02:59We're probably not gonna take the full 60 min, ok? Today's session, we're gonna go pretty deep on on the cloud connectors. We're gonna go pretty deep on contracts and even the file upload feature, but we'll probably not end up taking that full amount of time. And if you find yourself in the, the group that hasn't even logged into Cisco IQ before.03:18Don't worry. I think there's still some good information you're gonna take from today's session, even if you've not logged into the interface. But if that's you, I would definitely recommend that you take a look at Jackie's session from last week where she did a great job walking us through everything from login.03:37Walked us around the interface. Fantastic session. I'd highly encourage you to go check that out if you haven't already. Okay, so brief overview of today's agenda. This looks like a lot, and I promise it's not. Okay, so a lot of these will go through pretty quickly. I'm also gonna say today's session.03:51Team is pretty slide heavy.04:11And the reason for that, we do have a live environment that I'll pop over to occasionally I'll bring it up right now actually. So this is our Cisco demo lab and it's basically from a viewer's perspective. So you think of this as your end users that you support, right? You as the IT manager are gonna be most likely the super admin for.04:13Cisco IQ and you can give administrative or viewer access to others. So what I'll show you in here is what a viewer might see.04:33And a lot of what we're gonna talk about today are things that you as the administrator are going to have to do for your particular instance of Cisco IQ, and certainly more to come on that. But some of the things that we're gonna look at today, things that need to be done as an administrator can't really be shown live in a.04:40In a format like this unfortunately. So we'll look at some slide where we'll pop over to the Cisco demo environment as appropriate, right? Try to break things up a little bit and we'll go from there. So alright, oops, go back here.04:59So that is a look at our session for the day. Now, before we get too deep into today's content, I definitely want to level set. I don't want to make the assumption that you were at last week's session. I wanna, you know, we'll start fresh. We'll do a quick overview of Cisco IT itself.05:15And I think this slide, I think that I don't know who made this, but I love to share it. I think it does a lot of work for us because you as an IT manager probably identify with what you see on the left. I mean it's, it's it's chaos, right? It's, you know, being an IT manager running a healthy, safe, secure network is so much more than just knowing where your devices are, of course.05:32Right, you also need to know how to care for them. So we're talking about things like security advisories, what needs patched and when. We're talking about device hardening, we're talking about configuration best practices, right? All of these things that you have to manage on your own. And that's where Cisco IQ really starts to shine is because once you give Cisco IQ your device information.05:50Your data, right? And that data remains with you. It's not used to train AI models, it's not used to share with anybody else, it's your data. But once we have that data, then we can start doing some really interesting things. Not only can we start to correlate some of these.06:10Information sources with your particular device set, right? We can also start to use AI to start to surface insights. We can take that even deeper and start to use AI to give us more information, give it more analysis, like what are these insights really getting at? And even take it another step, a 3rd step.06:25In having AI help to even make recommendations, right? So if we surface a risk, let's understand more about the risk and then let's even take it the last step and tell you what to do with or about that risk, ok? But what that really means for you, right? What the the nuts and bolts of it is the bottom line of it is this.06:44We're taking you from a reactive firefighting posture to more of a proactive posture, right? And the, the key pillars here that I just want to talk about for a few minutes is how we do that. So complete landscape clarity, right? You've probably heard the outage that you can't protect what you can't see.07:04Clearly, right? So 1st and foremost, we're gonna help you understand what you have and where you have it, right? We're gonna take away those blind spots. We're gonna make sure that you're aware of all of the devices that need care and feeding, right? Foundationally, that's that's critically important. But once we have that baseline, then we can start to use our AI tools, the AI.07:24Right, which Jackie introduced last week, we're gonna talk quite a bit about over the next couple of weeks.07:44When we talk about proactive resilience, we're talking about root cause analysis before a problem even manifests, right? So this could be a lot of things. This could be security advisories that need to be patched before they become a problem or a vulnerability. This could become or this could be issues that arise out of configuration or miscon.07:49Configurations, right? Lots of different things, but.08:09Once we have that data and we set AI loose on creating those insights for you, that's when we're starting to going to surface that risk, right? And then not only surface it but make recommendations on how to mitigate that risk, right? And then rapid resolution, now there's, there's actually quite a lot to unpack in that, that short little phrase.08:13But a couple of things I want to point out, I would be willing to bet that nearly everybody, if not everyone on this call today, has been involved at least tangentially in a TAC case, right? So the general flow, right? Problem recognition, you open a TAC case, however you do that. Of course, there's different priorities, different severities, of course, right? But they generally follow the same.08:31Hello, so you contact Cisco and the technical assistance aren't. They say ok.08:51Give us these, these files, these logs, right? And then there's a little bit of back and forth and then we have a period where the problem is resolved. Now, when we bring Cisco IQ into this, a couple of things that go into this rapid resolution. So number one, when you open a TAC case, well now Cisco IQ can be your single point to.08:56And manage and close TAC cases. Great. File uploads, we can do through Cisco IQ. Fantastic. That's gonna save you some time.09:16But even when you open a TAC case, you can give Cisco IQ permission to go and capture that 1st set of logs so your TAC engineer can get immediately to work, right? Secondly, you can also give Cisco IQ permission if we have Cisco IQ link, right, which we'll talk about next week.09:22The tech engineer can actually remotely access in a read only fashion, but they can remotely access that device if they need to pull more information out of it, right? So again, you've not, you, you have stopped being the bottleneck in two separate instances, now we're compressing that timeline from issue recognition to issue resolution. So.09:39Now, again, there's a lot more to unpack there with the RS playbook, the resilient infrastructure services playbook, professional services on top, which we'll, we'll talk about in future sessions, but suffice to say, this is why Cisco IQ. Now, one of my favorite things to do, and I'm not a salesperson, but one of my favorite things to do in these conversations is.09:58It's to answer the next question. And the next question is always that's great, what's it gonna cost me?10:18Right? And that's where I love to see the look on, on people's face when I say nothing. It's, it's free of charge. It's free for you to use. Now that's comes with a bit of an asterisk as you can imagine, right? So that's the the current stance which we'll talk about, but I'm gonna spend a little bit of time on this slide in particular because service contracts is one of the top.10:23Topics that we're gonna talk about in adding Cisco IT.10:43To Cisco IQ today. So when we talk about the cost of using Cisco IQ, it's actually included with the support that you already paid for. So that's why I say it's free. It's NO additional charge on top of whatever you're already paying for support. So if you're not familiar with service contracts and with support and and that's fine, that's totally fine. We'll probably.10:46Over into the demo environment, we'll look at a couple of contracts a little bit later, just so you can kind of see what's in there. But suffice to say that fundamentally, the support contracts that we're adding to Cisco IQ are going to have a device list and that device list is going to have a particular.11:06Support level or support tier, so basic standard and signature. Now, whenever you have devices in your network that are on different tiers, that's very common, right? So a core device is probably on signature or at least standard. Whereas an edge device at a remote office is probably on basic or maybe has NO coverage at all.11:23Okay. Both of those scenarios are fine. What you're gonna find in Cisco IQ is that when you look at the more advanced features, when you look at some of these assessments, you'll see that they're only going to be applicable to those devices on that required tier. So most of that is standard and above.11:42Okay. The other thing that I want to mention here, and as of today, as of this recording, if you're watching this on recording, currently, even if your device does not have support, you still have access to some of the key features of Cisco IQ, ok? You can still get that device uploaded into Cisco IQ and you can still get things.11:58Things like last day of support notifications. You can still get.12:18Some of the asset tagging, some of the the end of life reporting, right? The asset inventory, things like that, ok? And we'll come back to service contracts here very shortly. But again, this, this is a collect a service contract is a collection point of basically devices.12:21A support tier and a term fundamentally, right? There's lots of different buying programs, lots of different types of contracts the way that you can get into these contracts that's, that's out of scope for today's discussion. So alright. What I mentioned today is pretty slide heavy, so I wanted to show you a few things just to kind of get us level set, but I'm gonna pop over.12:39Were.12:59Into the Cisco IQ live environment here. And thank you Jackie for posting that. If you've not logged into Cisco IQ before, it literally a matter of minutes to get from where you are without an account to where you see us right here, right, right now today. IQ.cisco.com, right? You're gonna use your Cisco CCO credentials.13:00Right? Single sign on, so NO other passwords to manage.13:20Very brief login process that's again it's it's out of scope for today's discussion, but you can walk through pretty quick and there's lots of great documentation that we could provide again at the end of the call here. All right, so again, this is viewer what you're seeing here. This is not the administrative view, but either way, either, either type, either the view.13:25Viewer or the administrator can come in, we can go to the home and system settings.13:44And you as the administrator, this is where you're gonna go, ok? Now me in this account, as a viewer, I can see things that have been configured. What I can't do is mess with them. I cannot add, I can't modify, I can't delete, ok? And that's by design, right? As you can imagine.13:49But you can see a number of things that we have in here. Now, what's in scope for today's discussion? So at the top here you see our cloud connectors. So these are cloud services that you probably already have, and we're gonna talk about each of the four of these in pretty good detail.14:07Here very shortly. The next one for next week's discussion is this next guy, the Cisco IQ link. Now, if you're a, you know, a CX cloud customer, you probably are very familiar with CX agents or maybe you use the CSPC collector, right? You'll see these are at the bottom here. So they are going to be showing, so you know that they're there and connected.14:24But note that we've labeled them legacy connector or legacy collectors, excuse me. And I think you can safely assume the writing is on the wall that these are going to be exiting soon. There's not a date official for that yet. So I don't know that it's necessarily a panic situation, but it's definitely something you need to start considering is what is your.14:43Federation path away from those collectors in favor of Cisco IQ Link.15:03So Cisco IQ link will absolutely be the path forward for development of different, different assessments within Cisco IQ, right? It'll also be ultimately the replacement for CSBC and CX agents, ok? Alright, so if we pop back over to the previous.15:08Presentation like I said, it is very slide heavy today, so a number of things.15:28And I'm just gonna skip through. So we have 1st up here service contracts, ok? Now, I will pop back over to the demo environment real quick. If you remember from last week, right, we can navigate using the left hand navigation pane here. We can go back to home to.15:33Takes all the way back to the beginning, we can go to the Cisco IQ link logo over here at the top, takes us to the same place back to the home and the overview, ok? Now, if we go into assets, we're gonna go into home and assets, alright? Or from our home screen, we could also just click on the assets module.15:53This might be one part that is slightly confusing, so when you're looking for devices, you think assets, NO problem, but when you're thinking for contracts, contracts are also the type of asset that we track in the assets tab here. So, so service contracts.16:14These are contracts that have been added already. Okay, so this is where we'll come back to in just a moment. Alright, now I think we've, well, I don't think we've definitely made the process easier. This is gonna look like a lot.16:29When we talk about adding contracts to the system, I think we streamlined that process actually very well. Some things that might still catch you, might be a bit of a stumbling block that you might have to call into Cisco TAC to, to, to have them help sort of sort out with you.16:47Okay, and I'm just gonna go down the list. I promise I'm not gonna read every slide, but there's a lot of great information here and I think some of it needs to be underscored, underlined. 1st of all, only an IQ admin, like I mentioned, you have to be an IQ admin or super admin in order to add contracts, right? So the page that I showed you, I don't I can see what's in there, but I can't add or.17:04Modify remove, right? So you have to be an IQ admin. Secondly, you have to have level two access on your contract already. Now, if you have, if you have access to open attack case, if you have access to download software, you're at least a level one user of your contract, ok? But you.17:24You have a contract administrator at your organization that manages those contracts, ok? So that person either needs to be the person to do adding the contract in Cisco IQ or they need to grant you level two access.17:44So then you become a contract administrator, right? Hopefully that's not too confusing. If you have questions about that, you can use the link here. And again, you're gonna get a copy of this after the call, so don't worry about taking furious notes here. You can also call in, right? Talk to your account team, even Cisco tech I think will help with something like this.17:57Where they'll help kind of manage through.18:17Any contract issues that you have, right? Next, you need on the, you need to have the, your organization matches your cco ID, obviously, right? The contract status has to be active signed or overdue. Expired contracts can't be added. I mean that kind of makes sense. This next one, the contract.18:19Has a unique end user GU, that's that's kind of an interesting one, the GU, the global ultimate. You think of that like an umbrella name.18:39For potentially having multiple companies within or with under one overall umbrella. Can't be a partner contract, has to be cisco branded. And this last one's kind of interesting that the contract must have hardware. I think that you might kind of scratch your head on that one a little bit. There are services software only contracts.18:46Today there isn't really a lot of benefit in adding those to Cisco IQ unless you just want to track the contract, you wanna have them all in one place. You certainly can do that.19:06But the idea for adding service contracts at all is to get the device list off of that service contract. Couple of limitations to keep in mind, the removal of the last contract, that means if you delete your whole list, that last one is going to require a tack case to remove.19:14And then if the contract is tied to US government in some form of flavor, it's going to be initially denied. And that's because Cisco IQ as a SaaS offering is not supported according to federal regulations on cloud offerings. It is possible to add that requires attack case and and a lot of of documentation.19:30So if that's something you need to do, please engage TAC.19:51On that one. Okay. All right, now like I said, we streamlined the process of adding contracts. It used to be, if you've already been logged in, if you've already gone through the setup process, it used to be you had to add one 1st. You had to have that number and add it. And then once that.19:54One added successfully, then you could go back and add some more. And that changed actually, I think for the better because now what's gonna happen when you go to add contracts.20:14And again, this is under the system settings, the service contracts, right? Where we looked just a moment ago. When you go in here now, you're gonna be presented with a list of contracts that are available for you, like level two, remember? Things that already match up, things that are are immediately available for you to import. So.20:23Might not be a full list, right? There might be some contracts that need some attention.20:43That's fine, right? But the ones that are available there, there's gonna just be a an option to select the ones that you'd like and then we'll add the contracts directly pretty straightforward. Now, before I move on, I'm gonna pop back over here just if you've never.20:47Played with a service contract before.21:07And that's, that's fine. That's probably, you know, a good many people on the call here. I'm gonna come back into Cisco IQ, and again, I'm in the assets module at the moment. Remember in assets we have both devices and contracts, right? And just kind of grabbing one sort of at random here, but you can actually tell just looking at this table.21:09So basically what's in it already.21:29But if we pop into contract here, there we go. So a few things that you'll see in here, right? I mean, obviously, you know, seller information, obviously term information, they are time bound, right? Support tier that we talked about, that's one of the big important features or the important pieces.21:31This is that Cisco IQ needs out of that contract is what is.21:51The support here and then support type, right? You're probably familiar with that. If you, if you've ever done an RMA case, right? That's, those kinds of things are which driven by the support type. And then of course the assets. Now, again, this is a demo lab. It is real real devices, but.21:54You know I wouldn't trust necessarily what's tied to what here. Now what's gonna come in with your service contract is we're gonna see serial number, we're gonna see device type, ok? So with that information, we can actually look in the back end and determine things like last day of support for hardware.22:12Great, you know, we can get that information for you. We can also see security vulnerabilities based on the product ID, the product family even, right? So even if all you do is put service contracts in, we can start to surface those risks. We can start to surface that information, start to use AI to understand and find the patterns.22:29Right and get you that information. The other thing that's unlocked is assuming that you have the support, right?22:49Cisco IQ will then be able to access Cisco TAC directly through the Cisco IQ interface using the AI system. You can also use the support module and we could take a little peek at that a little bit later here, ok? So having that contract that has that access brings in that data, but it also opens access.22:57As to use Cisco IQ to manage your attack cases, open managed flows, and as well as RMA cases.23:16Okay, right. So let's press on here. And again, if you have questions along the way, our panel is here ready to answer them for you, so make sure you're using that Slido and asking your questions.23:23Okay, so let's go through the big four cloud connectors that we have, starting with Intersight, ok? So you're gonna hear me say this four more times today that you have to be a Cisco IQ admin.23:40Right? Because again, you can't do this as a viewer. That's, that's very intentional. And then your Cisco IQ account email has to be entitled on the inter site accounts that you want to add. Okay, so those two have to match. A couple other caveats to call out, this is only the US region for now. Again, the removal of the last one's gonna require a tag case.23:55And then one to keep in mind, the only, the statically assigned intersight admins are supported, ok? And then new as of probably I think two weeks ago, the data population, whenever you connect inter site, it used to take potentially an hour, but generally a little bit longer. Now that data population is down.24:15Calendar an hour, and we have the daily refreshes. So you're gonna see that line repeated two more times the one and I'll call that out as we go here.24:35If you're not seeing data quickly, right, and everything else has been met here, probably ok to go ahead and open a tack case and see if there's something else going on, ok? But that's really about it for requirements for intersight. So where you're gonna go? And again, this isn't something that I un unfortunately I can't show you live.24:45But again, when you go into Cisco IQ, now this is you as the administrator. Remember I have the viewer only access on this particular environment. We're gonna go I'm gonna go actually go back to home and show you. I'll just kind of reset here. So from home we're going into system settings.25:04There's NO, there's NO button on the, the main page here to go to system settings. You're always gonna go into open system settings, ok? And then you as the administrator will have options up here that the viewer doesn't. Okay so you'll see where in inter site right now really as a viewer, all I can see are the instances that are connected.25:22Okay, so when I click on the little gear here, I can see all of our inter site instances that are connected, ok? Whereas you, as the admin, if there isn't an inter site instance already, you'll have the option to connect one.25:41And if there is one already, you'll have some additional options in the gear in order to manage, right? Add delete, whatnot, ok? But that's gonna be under the data connectors. Okay, so again we see data connectors even as a viewer.25:56Okay, but you'll notice that a lot of my other options as a viewer aren't aren't here, so, ok. So that's Intersight in a nutshell. Let's talk about Webex and a couple of things to call out about Webex.26:14Okay, so when you think about Webex, and of course think control hub, right? And when you're thinking about control hub, what you're really bringing in here, think about devices, ok? We're not really, you know, there's there's always been questions about, well, you know, can we bring in like communications manager through Webex, and I'll say not yet, right? That's definitely a.26:31Your consideration managing your on premises voice infrastructure through Cisco IQ is definitely a big ask.26:51That we have from the community and it's it's being worked on. But for now really we're just bringing in video devices, so room kits, things like that, and from control hub directly, not from a connected communications manager cluster.26:58Okay, so again you've heard me say this, you need to be an IQ admin, of course. You need to be an admin of the Webex organization that you're gonna add, ok? And you have to have your Cisco IQ account name. Now that one you're gonna find the account details and the account name.27:13Right, so you can grab that and then you need to have the Webex organization ID. All right. And again, the link here, you can navigate to management accounts. Once you have those pieces of information, then you can proceed forward. Now, a couple of new things, pretty cool. Again, the data population.27:30Is now a lot faster. This one actually took quite a bit longer some in some cases to make that connection. And 2nd point here, the reason it took quite a bit longer a lot of the time, is we actually required a TAC case in order to make that connection. So you actually had to open a case, give them your Cisco IQ account, give them your Webex.27:49Organization ID and somebody on the back end would make that connection for you when that's been unlocked now so you can self service.28:09And you can add this yourself, so, alright but then once you get that connected up, then you get the data population pretty quick and the the data refreshes as well. Okay.28:15Same sort of flavor here, so if there's NO Webex already connected, we'll have the connect button. If there are, you know, at least one or many, you'll have the gear icon, right? You as the administrator will have some additional options, right? And as you go through, we can add the organization.28:30Right, pretty straightforward, much like Intersight was. Okay. Now let's talk about Catalyst SD WAN manager. Right.28:48So again, you need to be a Cisco IQ admin. Your Cisco IQ account has to be an administrator on the SD WAN manager instance. Notice this instances, you can have multiple instances of SD WAN manager. The data collection needs to be enabled and the manager needs to be on version twenty.six or later.29:03Now, the other piece that applies here, the removal of the last SD WAN manager does require TAC case. The one piece that is missing here is what you've seen on the previous two, where the data availability less than an hour, this one still takes a little bit longer.29:25And then note that you're gonna see the the list of eligible SD WAN entities, right? Based on your session credentials. Okay. Pretty straightforward. And then likewise.29:43Same deal that we've talked about already. As a viewer, you can see what's there, what's what's maybe not. If there's nothing there as an admin, you can add one or multiple SD WAN manager instances, ok? And then manage them directly from there.29:59And Meraki. Now Meraki is a little bit different. Okay, so again, you need to be a Cisco IQ admin. For Meraki, you're actually gonna need to generate an API key, and that's really just to prove that you are who you say you are and you have administrative access to that Meraki instance, ok?30:20Yeah, so you will need to go into the Meraki dashboard, go into your profile I mean you can see the link here, go into your profile API access, generate an API key.30:40The API key has the full admin access to the organization that you want to onboard, ok? Again, that's just really a proof point. We're not gonna continue to use that API key. It's just a one time thing to to get you connected. But what you're gonna see is all of the orgs that are visible to that key, right? You can add one or many.30:48If the AP API key is invalid or rejected, you'll need to generate a new one. Again, same thing we've said before removal of the last Meraki organization, you'll need to open attack case. And then also like we said for the 1st two for Webex and intersight, the data populates a lot faster now.31:08Usually in in much less than an hour with the daily refreshes, ok? So again Meraki is the one where you're really gonna have to pay closer attention because that's the one that you're gonna have to actually generate an API key to get connected, ok? But otherwise, the process is actually very similar.31:26Okay, same deal that we've talked about for the previous three. If there's none there already, we're gonna hit connect. We'll add in the organization, right? It'll ask for the API key, right? You select what you want and we'll get that connected. If they're there already, you'll have the gear icons to manage.31:43The existing connections. Okay, and that's just a screenshot of what that looks like, right? And again, this is a one time thing. It's not gonna continually use that API key for the the communication. That communication is actually happening on the back end between Cisco IQ and the Meraki cloud.32:00Okay, so we're not gonna continue to send that API key.32:20All right. So one of the newer features in Cisco IQ is this thing called file upload, and you'll note, whenever I go back into, oh, I've been logged out, We'll go back in here in a minute.32:26This is something else that's not available to, Cisco IQ viewers, right? This is only available to the admin. But what we're doing here is we're giving you the opportunity to manually populate devices directly into Cisco IQ and pros and cons here, right? So let's let's walk through a couple of these.32:45So the contract, well, let me let me get to requirements and we'll talk about pros and cons. So the contract needs to be added to the system already, right? So step number one is always going to be add that contract, and then you can do cloud connectors or file upload or Cisco IQ link, right? The file itself.33:04It's just gonna be a list of serial numbers, right? And what we can do with that, it's actually useful information, right? We'll take those serial numbers, we'll match them up to a product type, right? So now we have some information in Cisco IQ to start looking at things like security advisories and, and Ldos and that kind of thing.33:22Okay. If you have device types in there that aren't yet supported, and I'll share that link here at the end of the presentation where you can see the list of supported devices, those those will be ignored, right? Cisco IQ can only manage one uploaded file at a time.33:38Right, there is consideration, this is not a roadmap call, but there is consideration to use this file upload process to actually update other information about your devices. So things like tags and locations and such. So.33:54You know, it's it's under consideration, there's NO confirmed timeline on if and when something like that's gonna be released, but there has been a lot of ask for that using this, this functionality for that purpose, right? And then uploaded assets, I don't have any in the live demo environment to show you what it looks like, but I will take a look at.34:10Over there and show you.34:30What, the different telemetry sources look like. Now I mentioned pros and cons. I mentioned pros and cons with service contracts and with file upload, and I just want to take a minute to unpack that. So, when you upload something using using the file upload, e.g., really what you're doing is creating a static.34:34Entity within Cisco IQ. That entity does not have telemetry, right? Obviously, we're just we what's a serial number that we can, we can find basic information on that in the back end of Cisco and give you basic information about that based on the product type, but we're not getting active telemetry. We can't tell you anything about the configuration. We can't tell you any.34:54Thing about the software ldos, right?35:13That's ok, right? That's ok. We can still get you some basic information, but really what we're we're gonna focus on is things that can give us telemetry. So the cloud connectors especially, right? Those are live connections to the the cloud management platforms where we get real data.35:18Right, with real telemetry. And then of course Cisco IQ link. We're recommending that everybody that uses Cisco IQ has Cisco IQ Link because that's where all the future development for Cisco IQ is going to come from because that is the greatest source of telemetry data, right? That's the device that can actually live behind your firewall.35:34I'll talk to your devices, collect configurations, do live troubleshooting, right?35:54Whereas with something uploaded into the system statically, right? We can't really, can't really do that, of course. Now, one of the questions that always comes up is, you know, well, what if I upload some devices and then another cloud connectors finds that same device, right? And we get a duplicate in here, right?35:59So there is a deduplication engine that runs, and that deduplication engine actually prefers the richest source of telemetry, ok? So if you upload a catalyst switch, e.g., using the file upload tool, and that same catalyst switch is found behind Catalyst Center, e.g., by way of Cisco IQ Link.36:16Right, that record, the telemetry based record is gonna be preferred over the static record, right? Now I will note, if you are having problems, if you're seeing duplicates in your system, if you're seeing old data in your system, please raise a TAC case, right? You shouldn't be seeing that. So go ahead and.36:35Ping tack on that one. Okay, so generally what we're looking at here for the file upload, again, I'm not gonna be able to show you this slide because the file upload is an administrative feature, right? But it's in the same place, in the system settings.36:54And you'll find it right below the data connectors. Now, we do offer a template. Currently the template is pretty basic, right? And the only thing that's really required whenever you fill out the template, it's it's just a CSV file, right? The only thing that's really required is a serial number. And again, we use that serial number to track and make sure that device belongs to you as well as being a supported device.37:10If both of those are true, we'll bring it into Cisco IQ, we'll grab some basic information about, you know, the product type and such. Okay, so basically process will go to file upload, we'll download the template, We'll out the template, we'll drop the template back into the file upload and click the upload option there.37:30Okay. Pretty straightforward. All right. Now I do want to mention Cisco IQ Link.37:49Again, it's, it's not in scope for today's discussion, but just to kind of talk to you a little bit about what's coming next week. One of the biggest questions we always get is, well, you went through this great list of products. Where's Catalyst Center, right? I have Catalyst Center managing thousands of devices. I don't want to enter all of those manually, right? Of course.38:07Of course, and that's really one of the the great things about Cisco IQ LiNK. So again, Cisco IQ Link is a virtual appliance, and again, we'll talk about this a lot next week. It is a virtual appliance that lives on your network in your hypervisor, right? We, we do support multiple hypervisors.38:24And it's going to make that connection to Catalyst Center or potentially multiple catalyst centers. It also has the ability to make connections directly to devices on your network, whereas that device can't talk directly to Cisco IQ in the cloud, it can talk to Cisco IQ Link, which then reports up to Cisco IQ.38:40On its behalf, ok? So next week is all about deploying Cisco IQ link from, you know, all of the the specifications that you need in your hypervisor right now to let's take a look at, now it does take about 2 h start to finish, so we can't show it live, of course, but you know we'll walk through that whole process.38:56Of what you can expect and, then we'll go from there. All right. Okay, so I'm just gonna pull up our lab again if you'll forgive me just.39:15A moment and talking about telemetry, I want to show just a couple of real quick things in our lab, but I apologize I'm logging in off screen just for privacy reasons here.39:36Alright, let me pull this in now. And if you'll forgive me just a moment, let's go back to full screen mode. There we go. Okay, so we talked about, we talked about in the assets, we have both the devices as well as the contracts.39:56So let's take, just since we have some time here, this is, like I said, a generally a shorter session. Let's take a peek at our inventory. Now again Jackie did a great job showing us around the interface last week. One thing that I want to take a look at here.40:12I have it already, I do not, ok? So anytime you're looking at a table, just as a reminder, right? It's very customizable, so a lot of places in Cisco IQ, you're gonna find a few things, right? You're you're always going to find the AI system at the top here. So if you have a question about a device, it's just like any other.40:30Any other AI experience you've probably already had, it's natural language processing, right? So you can ask it a question just in your natural language. You don't have to match some kind of crazy algorithm to get a good response. So if you have a question about name name your product, right? A particular switch type being affected by a particular.40:50Security advisory, I mean, again, just ask a question. Okay, but that's always gonna be up there at the top waiting for you, ok? Most of what you're gonna encounter as well, you're gonna have AI insights at the top here. And anytime you see a table, you'll have a couple of options just right off the bat in the the little gear icon over here, right? So.41:08The density of the table, right? We can expand, we can contract for more data in there as well as the columns of data that we have here. And the one I want to look at very in particular.41:27It's the data sources, right? So I'm gonna hit data sources and we'll apply, right? Now you can also of course take these off. You can move columns around, you can, you know, delete columns, make columns bigger, just like you would expect. The other thing I want to do real quick is the filters.41:37We have a lot of filters, ok? You can also save filters. So, you know, if you find a particular filter set that works for you and your workflow, great, you know, go ahead and save it and save multiple. But a couple of things to look at here. I want to look for data source.41:55And like I said, I don't think we have one in here for file upload, which is unfortunate, but for the others, so we talked about intersight, right? So we can see data source for intersight, e.g., for our different instances. I know this is kind of small text might be a little bit difficult to read, so I apologize for that, but so we're still getting data from CX cloud.42:14We're still getting data from CSPC, right? Cisco IQ link, of course, right? And then the catalyst center behind Cisco IQ link. We talked about control hub, so we're getting some information about connected conference systems. Meraki SD WAN manager. You get the point, right? We have a lot of different data sources now.42:34Okay, four from the cloud. We have Cisco IQ link collecting things directly and via catalyst center. We have the the contracts, we have like Cisco commerce here, and unfortunately we don't have the actually customer upload we do have it in here. Anyway, so that data is in there. So if you need to know like what is.42:53Coming from a particular.43:12Information source, right? We can, we can definitely find that. The other thing that it's dad, let me close this real quick. If we go back to home, and we have the support.43:15Option here. So the other thing that I tease that is once you get a service contract that has access to TAC, you can start to use the AI assistant and the support module to manage your TAC cases and RMA cases. So just to take a super quick peek at that, so we can go into the support module or we can come into home and support same difference.43:33Right, just two different places depending on where you're starting from. Now, you could also go directly to the AI assistant and say, you know, I'm having problems with device XYZ, it will actually even walk you through a troubleshooting series of steps if you like, or you can ask it directly, you know, please open a TAC case.43:53Right, and it can do that for you. But I mentioned that we can use the support module to actually manage cases. Now we're not gonna go deep into this today. We'll actually actually go pretty deep in an example of this in two weeks in our 4th session of the series, but suffice to say that it's here, right? And I also mentioned that if you're using Cisco IQ link, then we have.44:12Have some of those additional rapid resolution features available to you. If you permit them, right? You can turn them off like the initial log collection as well as the remote access. You can absolutely turn those off if you feel like that's a security risk, NO problem at all, ok? Alright, so I think we'll call that good there.44:32Let's pop back over and talk about some next steps. Alright, so what we're completing here today again is the contracts and data connectors session. Next week, again, I I know I've mentioned this several times. We're going very deep on Cisco IQ link. We're recommending that everybody that uses.44:52Cisco IQ has a Cisco IQ link.45:12Right, it is gonna be the best source of telemetry for Cisco IQ, meaning that you're gonna get the most impact in Cisco IQ through the AI system, through the different assessments that we'll talk about in more detail as well, right? But Cisco IQ link is gonna be the one and especially for catalyst center, for our catalyst center users out there.45:15Right, let it be the single point of telemetry for your vast network of, of wired and wireless devices, right? Great, so tune in same time next week, we're actually Dan's gonna be taking us through the deploying Cisco IQ link and then Jackie comes back to close out the series.45:32For session four on the 27th talking about turning insights into action. All right, now I promise some resources just before we close up here. The one in the top left here talking about the the documentation landing page, probably the best place to go. We get a lot of questions about supported devices.45:50So bottom left will show you all the devices that are currently supported. Some of those are only supported directly through Cisco IQ link, so definitely keep a, an eye on that. Different telemetry types we can also link out to that if you have any questions about.46:10Things that we can collect via telemetry or use, in, in helping you manage your devices, right? Some great getting started guides. We, we frequently get questions about AI transparency. So like, what are you doing with my data? Where does my data live? What language models are you actually using? All great questions and I will say to.46:26That we do not use your data for training any AI model.46:46Right, your data is yours. Your data is used only for context as you engage with the the Cisco AI assistant, ok? Full stop. But if you'd like to read more about that, absolutely take a look at the AI transparency and technical notes.46:50Anyway, lots of great resources there. Also, another interesting resource here is we have on the Cisco communities, if you're familiar with that, we have an ask me anything session running throughout the month of October for this particular series. If you have questions after the call, right? And actually after today's call, when it closes after you take the survey.47:07You'll actually be redirected here. So you'll find things like the recordings of this month's sessions. We do try to get those posted pretty quick. I'm not sure that last week's session is posted yet. We'll double check on that, but you'll also find a PDF of all of our presentation materials for the month.47:27Okay, so feel free to ask questions there and our community moderators will be happy to answer them. Okay, and then while you're in the Cisco communities page, please do check out our other expert insights series and as well as global webinars. Cisco is approaching the end of our 1st fiscal quarter.47:42So with the launch of Q2, we're actually gonna have a fresh batch of content across the board. So you'll find these cover all architectures. We have many global time zones covered different languages, of course.48:02And it's all free, it's all completely free, but you do have to register for those live sessions. Okay. So with that, I'd like to thank you for spending part of your day with us. Hopefully today's session was informative again.48:14Once the session closes, you will be directed to a survey. Brief five question survey, please give us your feedback. How do we make these sessions better? What else would you like to hear about? And I'll tell you that there's gonna be a free text section as as well. So if you'd like to be contacted by customer success or Cisco in general, please leave us a note. We absolutely take those very seriously.48:34And we'll have somebody reach out to you soon on that. So with that, thanks again for your time and we look forward to seeing you in a future session.48:54