Cisco Catalyst Center FAQ
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The documentation set for this product strives to use bias-free language. For the purposes of this documentation set, bias-free is defined as language that does not imply discrimination based on age, disability, gender, racial identity, ethnic identity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and intersectionality. Exceptions may be present in the documentation due to language that is hardcoded in the user interfaces of the product software, language used based on RFP documentation, or language that is used by a referenced third-party product. Learn more about how Cisco is using Inclusive Language.
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● Accelerate digital agility: With a powerful Cisco ecosystem, extensible APIs, and third-party integrations, Catalyst Center enables business process automation and accelerates digital agility.
● Scale at the speed of business: Catalyst Center gets your network up and running faster. It continuously optimizes network performance and includes tools to plan and execute network changes to match business needs.
● Reduce operating expenses: Catalyst Center automates network operations, thus saving valuable human capital and reducing operational costs.
● Minimize business impact: Using AI, Catalyst Center predicts potential issues and provides guided diagnostics to reduce downtime and minimize business impact.
● Deliver optimal end-user experience: Catalyst Center provides complete visibility into network health, application performance, and end-user experience. It includes tools to visualize the end user’s network and application experience and helps deliver optimal end-user experience.
● Secure the digital enterprise: Catalyst Center is at the center of the Cisco® Zero Trust solution for the workplace. It improves your overall security posture by reducing the attack surface of the network, mitigating vulnerabilities, monitoring endpoint behavioral anomalies, and enforcing security policies.
● Help attain sustainability goals: Catalyst Center helps increase the efficiency of IT and OT infrastructure and optimize resource utilization. It is a crucial component of the Cisco smart building portfolio, enabling sustainable workplaces.
● Excellent wireless experience: Catalyst Center offers users an excellent wireless experience through features such as AI-Enhanced RRM, which uses historical AI insights to adjust the wireless environment automatically to optimize performance.
● Unique insights into wireless devices: Through Cisco’s technical partnership with Apple iOS, Samsung, and Intel, IT gains unique insights into the health of end-user devices while users gain a better wireless experience.
● Faster time to resolve issues: Catalyst Center’s AI Machine Reasoning Engine, powered by a cloud-hosted knowledge base using decades of Cisco best practices data, helps troubleshoot complex issues and resolve them faster.
● Deep application insights: Users get a better application experience and IT gains insights into the health of applications, including collaboration apps such as Webex® by Cisco and Microsoft Teams. Available integration with Cisco ThousandEyes® further enhances application visibility.
● Design: Model your entire network, physical and virtual, from geographic locations, sites, buildings, and floors to devices and links. Define software images for device families and designate golden images, configuration templates, and profiles.
● Discover: Discover all your network devices and manage the inventory. Discover and profile endpoints and enable enforcement of group-based policies.
● Policy: Use policies to automate and accelerate rollout of services. Define group-based access policies, application services, and policies.
● Provision: Automate onboarding and provisioning of network devices with zero-touch provisioning. Provision services such as IoT services, Cisco User Defined Network, and application hosting on switches. Provision SD-Access fabric sites, virtual networks, etc., and realize the benefits of software-defined networks.
● Assurance – visibility: Gain complete visibility into the health and performance of network devices and applications and the end-user experience with various available dashboards. View issues that may be impacting business services, determine the root cause, and resolve issues.
● Assurance – AI Analytics: Use AI to proactively monitor deviations from the norm and predict potential issues. Use machine reasoning capabilities to accelerate root cause determination and take advantage of guided workflows to resolve issues quickly.
● Workflows, tools, and reports: Take advantage of an extensive library of workflows, tools, and reports to ease configuration of services, automate device maintenance, and generate reports.
● APIs and integrations: Automate business processes using an extensive integrated Cisco ecosystem as well as third-party applications. Use rich APIs for custom automation and integration with your applications.
● Automation: Catalyst Center automates discovery of network devices and simplifies provisioning with features such as Plug and Play (PnP) and zero-touch provisioning.
● Policy driven: Policy-based administration allows administrators to define policies that are translated into configurations and applied to all applicable devices and helps ensure that configurations comply with corporate standards.
● Compliance: Software Image Management (SWIM) eliminates manual effort involved in keeping device software up to date and helps ensure compliance.
● Third-party ecosystem: Integration with applications such as ServiceNow, Splunk, and PagerDuty enable IT process automation.
● Visibility: Catalyst Center provides deep visibility into the health and performance of the network and applications, as well as the end-user experience. These dashboards, together with issues and events dashboards, bring potential issues to the surface quickly, thus saving valuable time and effort and greatly improving the availability of the network.
● Faster troubleshooting: The Machine Reasoning Engine automates complex troubleshooting so that network issues can be resolved quickly by first-level IT administrators.
● Guided workflows: Several built-in workflows, such as access point configuration and device replacement workflows, can be used to automate deployment and maintenance activities.
In summary, Catalyst Center saves valuable human capital by automating network operations, helps assure compliance, improves reliability and availability of network services, and delivers an optimal end-user experience.
● Intuitive group-based policies: Intuitive group-based policies help you segment the network virtually at a granular level. Together with Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE), Catalyst Center profiles all endpoints, including IoT devices, authenticates devices and users, and enforces access policies.
● AI Endpoint Analytics: AI Endpoint Analytics further enhances security by providing complete visibility into endpoints, profiling and grouping endpoints, identifying anomalous behavior, and automating the quarantine process.
● Cisco security suite: Out-of-the-box integration with the Cisco security suite, which includes Cisco Umbrella®, Cisco Secure Network Analytics, and Cisco Talos®, enhances the security of the digital enterprise by reducing exposure to security threats.
● Compliance: Software and configuration compliance monitoring of network devices mitigates vulnerabilities by helping ensure that software and security patches are applied in a timely fashion, and that device configurations are consistent with corporate policies.
As a key component of the Cisco Zero Trust solution for the workplace, Catalyst Center helps implement zero-trust network access for your network.
● Intent APIs, which enable continuous network alignment to the changing needs of IT and business.
● Integration APIs, which enable integration of Cisco and third-party IT and network systems for streamlining IT operations across domains that were previously siloed.
● Events and notifications, to help resolve issues proactively by helping third-party applications listen and respond to events.
Software Development Kits (SDKs) are available for popular platforms such as Python and Ansible to enable faster development and smoother integration.
Q. How is Catalyst Center licensed?
A. A Catalyst software subscription for Cisco Catalyst switching and wireless devices is required to activate management of these devices by Catalyst Center. Certain capabilities of Catalyst Center may require specific tiers of Catalyst software subscription and expansion packs. Review the Cisco Catalyst Software licensing e-book and Catalyst Center data sheet for more details. If you have more licensing-specific questions, check out this FAQ.
● Local network telemetry: Catalyst Center collects data from several different sources and protocols on the managed network. This data is kept on the Catalyst Center appliance locally at your location and is available for a period of 14 days. Local network telemetry is not transported to any other server, nor is it sent to the cloud.
● De-identified cloud telemetry: Catalyst Center uses de-identified cloud telemetry data stored on a cloud server for AI Network Analytics. It does not send the cloud telemetry to the cloud server by default, and customers can opt in to take advantage of AI Network Analytics.
● Catalyst Center product usage telemetry: Catalyst Center is configured to automatically connect and transmit product usage data to Cisco. This telemetry is used by Cisco to improve appliance lifecycle management and serve customers better. Customers may opt out by turning this feature off in Catalyst Center.