Cisco Crosswork Network Controller 7.2.x Administration Guide

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Cisco Crosswork Network Controller 7.2.x Administration Guide

Large Routers

Updated: August 14, 2026

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Outlines the requirements and procedures for managing Large Routers (LR) within Cisco Crosswork Network Controller. It details the technical criteria for high-scale ASR 9000 devices, essential GNMI configuration and bundling requirements, and the step-by-step onboarding process.

A Large Router (LR) is a high-scale ASR 9000 router category that

  • supports very large interface counts,

  • requires a specialized inventory collection approach for reliable discovery, and

  • is identified by Crosswork Network Controller to enable optimized inventory handling.

Some ASR 9000 router deployments operate at significantly higher interface scale than typical devices. At this scale, standard inventory collection approaches are not sufficient. Crosswork Network Controller introduces the LR classification to distinguish these high-scale ASR 9000 routers and apply an inventory strategy suited to large-scale deployments, without affecting inventory behavior for other devices.

Requirements for LR inventory

This section describes the device-side requirements and inventory behavior that must be met before onboarding a LR in Crosswork Network Controller.

Criteria for LR inventory support

Large router inventory support applies only to devices that meet all these conditions:

Table 1. Criteria for LR inventory support

Attribute

Value

Platform

ASR 9000 (ASR 9K)

Minimum number of interfaces

1000

Software version

Special image- Contact Cisco Customer Experience

Supported scale

Up to 48K interfaces

GNMI encoding

JSON_IETF encoding

Devices that do not meet these criteria are not supported for LR inventory handling.

GNMI configuration requirements

Inventory collection for LR uses GNMI.

Ensure these configurations on the ASR 9K device:

  • GNMI is enabled on the device

  • GNMI access is available using the configured device credentials

  • GNMI supports the OpenConfig interfaces model

GNMI-based inventory collection is triggered during device addition and inventory synchronization.

For GNMI configuration sample, see Configuration sample for gNMI and gRPC.

GNMI bundling requirements

GNMI bundling is recommended on ASR 9K devices used as LRs to improve inventory performance. Bundling groups multiple GNMI updates into a single update, reducing processing overhead.

For LR devices:

  • Inventory relies on bundled GNMI responses to complete collection efficiently.

  • If GNMI bundling is not enabled, inventory collection may fail.

Inventory collection behavior

For devices that meet the LR criteria:

  • Inventory uses GNMI with JSON_IETF encoding

  • CLI- and SNMP-based interface collection is bypassed only for the inventory features that have been replaced by GNMI-based large routers collection.

Onboard large ASR 9000 routers

Onboard an ASR 9000 Large Router device to enable large-scale inventory collection of interface data through GNMI.

Onboarding the ASR 9000 LR ensures that all interface and sub-interface information from the device is accessible in the inventory system. This is required for comprehensive monitoring and management of large wireless routers within your network, especially when using GNMI for scalable data retrieval.

Note

GRE tunnel interfaces are not modeled in inventory for LR devices.

Before you begin

Ensure that the device meet the requirements mentioned in Requirements for LR inventory.

Follow these steps to onboard an LR device:

Procedure

1.

Create the LR identification tag (one-time setup).

For information on tag creation, see Create tags.

  • Category: DeviceClassification

  • Tag name: large-interface-density

Note

This tag is not created by default and must be manually created.
2.

Create a credential profile that includes GNMI credentials, SNMP credentials, and CLI credentials.

For more information, see Create credential profiles.
3.

Add a new ASR 9K device. For more information, see Add devices individually through the UI and Field descriptions for new device addition.

  • Set Admin state to Up.

  • Enable Reachability check (recommended).

  • Select Tag as large-interface-density.

  • Select the credential profile created earlier.

Note

If the large-interface-density tag is applied to an unsupported device, inventory collection will not complete.
4.

Add the newly added device to a Data Gateway.

For more information, see Attach devices to Data Gateway.

Note

Distribute LR devices evenly across available Data Gateways to avoid overloading a single gateway.
5.

Trigger inventory synchronization.

  1. On the Network Devices window, perform an inventory sync.

    • Select the ASR 9000 devices and click Actions > Detailed sync selected devices.

    • If you do not select any devices, click Actions > Detailed sync all devices.

  2. Monitor the device status.

    • Status changes to In progress

    • On success, status changes to Completed

  • The device reaches Completed state.

  • All interfaces are visible under the Interfaces tab, which can be accessed by navigating to Topology > Device details or Topology > Device details > Detailed inventory.