Cisco Crosswork Network Insights Data Sheet

 

The Cisco Crosswork Cloud Network Insights^™ platform addresses routing event security and awareness challenges by providing comprehensive global monitoring and analysis capability and unprecedented insights across a hybrid cloud infrastructure.

Product overview

Your network can be a complex and often unpredictable environment. Routing events that are caused by automated systems, malicious attacks, or simply operational errors can have unforeseen effects on network services. Network operators need a scalable and insightful toolset to help them identify root cause network issues swiftly. The operational performance data provided by networks is plentiful, but the existing toolsets lack an understanding of the network control state. Routing protocol event information can be difficult to comprehend when not organized, analyzed, and displayed logically. There is great operational value in network data and using Cisco’s unparalleled expertise with routing protocols, Crosswork Cloud Network Insights has been developed to structure the information needed for quickly resolving issues throughout the network.

Network Insights is a hosted application that provides rich analysis, visualization, and alerting on actionable network events. Cisco Crosswork Cloud Network Insights operates as a hosted service and helps you assess the routing health of your network. We provide you with information you need to determine the stability of your networks and potential risks to your IP routing assets.

Network Insights aggregates global and local routing information and identifies the source of anomalies based on a consensus of the routing databases. This cloud service is a successor of BGPMon.net for multivendor networks that use BGP routing protocols. The service provides a secure and low-risk method of collecting route information at a global scale. We can do all this while tracking hundreds of thousands of IP route update records and maintaining their event history.

Product description

Cisco Crosswork Cloud Network Insights is a revolutionary cloud-based platform for presenting real-time network routing, event, and traffic information. It uses IETF standards-based routing control protocols in combination with a cloud-native architecture to capture the state of your network’s control plane. Crosswork Cloud Network Insights combines several technologies and services to provide a unique awareness of your network and how it interacts with other environments. The platform sets a new standard for its ability to provide a comprehensive view of the state of IP address assets. Subscribers can track live and historical activity of their own global BGP and IP information. They can also quickly and easily investigate other entities that might be the cause of issues based on the information provided by the platform.

Network control protocols such as BGP enable network operators to manage the scale of both the internet and their own internal routing domains. The scale that BGP brings also creates challenges in the amount of IP route information and the integrity of that information. Network routing issues can come from many sources. Network Insights is designed to give your organization the tools to identify and understand routing events as they happen. This unique cloud service will significantly reduce the time it takes to know what is happening to your network and IP address assets—a critical step in reducing the Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) for control plane issues.

The timeline to know when a routing event has impacted your network

The timeline to know when a routing event has impacted your network

Cisco Crosswork Cloud Network Insights collects network data through a secure, federated collection model and provides routing data analytics to significantly reduce mean time to repair. This cloud service provides network operators the following initial capabilities:

●     Real-time and historical visualizations of global BGP route events

●     Alarms and notifications

●     ASN and prefix registration and geographic position

●     Global route table browser and looking glass services

●     Dashboards including but not limited to:

◦     AS health

◦     Prefix health

◦     Peering analytics

This cloud-based service will continue to be expanded and enhanced for our subscriber community.

Cisco Crosswork Cloud Network Insights is built to communicate and alert on issues using new collaboration media platforms and legacy methods such as email. These collaborative tools help network operation teams’ coordinate their efforts in real time to resolve issues. The architecture also supports the integration of third-party plug-ins.

Cisco Crosswork Cloud Network Insights is designed to manage very large-scale service provider data sets. The service architecture is capable of live-tracking millions of IP prefix updates while maintaining their historical state information.

Cisco Crosswork Cloud Network Insights is for anyone who needs to understand how their networks are routed and how their IP prefixes are seen from hundreds of other networks worldwide. We give you the live tools to see issues of interest as they happen. The service will continue to evolve, providing organizations the capability to protect and understand their IP routing assets.

External route analysis use cases

External route analysis use cases

Continuous routing event awareness and management

The Crosswork Cloud Network Insights platform features continuous monitoring of routing event workflow use cases:

●     Independent out-of-band monitoring of my edge routers and my IP prefixes

◦     Receive fully out-of-band notifications using SMS and mobile application tools

●     Monitor changes to critical routes inside and outside my network

◦     Monitor critical third-party routes

◦     Monitor how my routes are seen by third parties

●     Forensic BGP update analysis

◦     Evidence chain of route changes seen over time

◦     Identify short-lived route events and their state that is no longer current

●     BGP hi-jack event signatures

◦     Detect AS origin violations without ROA/RPKI

◦     Detect ROA/RPKI violations

◦     Detect malicious, more-specific IP prefix advertisements

◦     Detect Man-in-the-Middle (MiTM) attacks

●     BGP route leak event signatures

◦     Detect unexpected new prefixes originated from an ASN

◦     Detect unexpected, more-specific IP prefix advertisements

◦     Detect unexpected prefixes from specific peer devices

◦     Detect unexpected AS neighbor changes

◦     Detect AS path length violations at specific peer locations

●     Integration with Crosswork automation tools

◦     Automate pre- and post-change route state changes

◦     Automate and validate ingress route filtering

◦     Identify route event situations and define remediation opportunities

◦     For more information go to www.cisco.com/go/crosswork

Express configuration

The express configuration feature enables first-time users to quickly configure and start monitoring their IP prefixes based on their ASN information. The feature will automatically populate the configuration of the service for all IP prefixes based on their current observed state.

Express Setup Feature

Monitored IP prefix alarm history

The alarm history enables the user to quickly identify IP prefix alarm events of importance. Events can be sorted and searched in various ways to quickly locate the root cause of a service-impacting incident. Once an event is located, the detailed information for that event can be viewed as part of the next action. Subscribers will have different lookback periods based on the tier of subscription purchased.

Alarm History

IP prefix alarm details

Each alarm event can be viewed in detail. Detailed BGP event information can be viewed to assess the cause and impact of each BGP event signature. The detailed forensic BGP update information can then be viewed to locate offending route change sources and to quickly identify the appropriate remediation action. A history of the frequency of each BGP event signature can then be compared to understand related route events for the same policy.

Detailed BGP Event Information

Features and benefits

Table 1.           Lists the main features and benefits of the Crosswork Cloud Network Insights

Products subscription tiers

Crosswork Cloud Network Insights is a natural evolution of the BGPmon.net service. Customers familiar with the BGPmon Premium service can purchase an equivalent service offering using the Crosswork Network Insights Essentials subscription tier. This Essentials service provides approximate price and feature parity with the now end-of-sale BGPmon.net Premium Service.

The Crosswork Cloud Network Insights Advantage and Premier service tiers expand on the new platform to provide new insight and analysis capabilities. These new services provide expanded near real-time and historical state information for each monitored IP prefix. Unlike the basic tier service, these tiers will continue to be enhanced with new alarm, reporting, and analysis capabilities over time. The primary difference between the Advantage Tier and the Premier Tier is the accessibility of historical route information and its use in event normalization.

Crosswork Cloud Network Insights Service Tiers

The following matrix details feature supported per subscripted tenancy and prefix options for Crosswork Network Insights.

Feature support may be subject to the configured state of an IP prefix:

A = Any IP prefix advertised on the internet

C = Only configured IP prefixes advertised on the internet

X = Feature is available regardless of IP prefix information

Table 2.           Product subscription tiers

Ordering information

Cisco Crosswork Cloud Network Insights is available. To order, please visit the Cisco Ordering Home Page.

Cisco Crosswork Cloud Network Insights feature tiers can be ordered in one-year, three-year, and five-year subscription periods. In addition, volume discounts are available for customers ordering higher numbers of monitored IP prefixes at the same time. There are separate license options for Essentials, Advantage, and Premier tiers, detailed below. The SaaS software is accessible at crosswork.cisco.com.

Cisco Smart Accounts and Smart Licensing are supported for Cisco Crosswork Cloud Network Insights. In addition, Cisco Connection Online (CCO) user accounts are mandatory to use the Network Insights user interface. Enterprise Single Sign-on (SSO) with federated identity source is supported via OKTA federation with Cisco.com.

Table 3.           Ordering information

Cisco and Partner Services

www.cisco.com

Cisco offers a wide range of services to help accelerate your success in connecting to Cisco Crosswork Cloud Network Insights. The innovative Cisco Services offerings are delivered through a unique combination of people, processes, tools, and partners and are focused on helping you increase operational efficiency and improve your network control. Cisco Advanced Services use an architecture-led approach to help you align your network infrastructure with your business goals and achieve long-term value. Cisco Crosswork^™ products can be combined with the Cisco SMARTnet^® service to help you resolve mission-critical problems with direct access at any time to Cisco network experts and award-winning resources. Spanning the entire network lifecycle, Cisco Services offerings help increase investment protection, optimize network operations, support migration operations, and strengthen your IT expertise. For more information, please visit www.cisco.com/go/services.

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Learn more

For more information on Cisco's network automation portfolio for Service Providers please visit www.cisco.com/go/crosswork.To learn more about Cisco Crosswork or to schedule a demonstration contact your Cisco sales representative.

Document history

Table 4.           Document revisions