Cisco Crosswork Network Controller 7.2.x Administration Guide
Outlines maintenance and post-setup operations for Crosswork Data Gateway, including planned downtime, configuration updates, collection setup, and system integration tasks that help maintain secure, efficient, and minimally disruptive network data collection.
Enable secure, efficient, and interruption-minimized network data collection management by planning downtime, updating configurations, and ensuring proper setup of collections and systems integration. The maintenance activities involve:
A Crosswork Data Gateway health metric is managed from the Data Gateway page that
indicates the operational state and resource performance of a Data Gateway
enables historical tracking of outages, performance trends, and possible failures, and
supports analysis of resource usage such as CPU, network traffic, and service status.
For information on accesing the Data Gateway page, see Access Data Gateway health information.
These parameters are displayed on the Data Gateway page:
General Crosswork Data Gateway details: displays the operational state, high availability state, attached device count, and assigned jobs.
Actions: lists the various troubleshooting options that are available from the UI.
Ping: checks the reachability to any IP address.
Trace route: helps troubleshoot latency issues. This option provides a time estimate for the Data Gateway to reach the destination.
Download service metrics: downloads the metrics for all collection jobs for a Data Gateway from the Cisco Crosswork UI.
Download showtech: downloads the showtech logs from Cisco Crosswork UI.
Reboot: reboots the Data Gateway.
Change log level: allows you to change the log level of a Data Gateway's components, such as collectors (cli-collector) and infra services (oam-manager). Log level changes apply only to the Data Gateway receiving the change.
History: shows the outage chart for Data Gateway over 14 days. The chart includes timestamps, outage times, and clear times.
The top-right corner of the pane provides options to zoom in, zoom out, pan, or download the history chart as SVG or PNG files for specific time periods.
Events: lists state changes, role changes, reason messages, timestamp, and duration over the last 14 days.
Health: indicates health information, last health data collected, error states, CPU utilization alerts, and NIC traffic speeds.
If the Data Gateway is in an Error state or if the data is stale for any reason, the timestamp label highlights that the data is old.
If the CPU utilization of a Data Gateway exceeds 80%, we recommend taking corrective action before it increases further, which could lead to failure of the Data Gateway.
The Network In/Out section displays the speed at which the vNICs send and receive network data.
To view the interface roles assigned to the vNICs, click the ? icon next to Additional role information. The popup provides information about the available roles.
Service status:displays health information for each container service running on the Data Gateway, as well as resource consumption. For any individual service, you can restart it using Actions > Restart. The Load column shows the processing load of each collector or service. Load scores are calculated using several metrics and mapped to low, medium, or high severity zones.
A collector that consistently operates in the High zone has reached peak capacity for its assigned CPU or memory resource profile. For more information on load score calculation, see Load Score Calculation.
The resource consumption data displayed comes from Docker statistics. These values are higher than the actual resources consumed by the containerized service.
The list of container services differs between Standard Data Gateway and Extended Data Gateway, with the Extended Data Gateway having more containers installed.
Identify and review Data Gateway alarms indicating anomalies in data collection.
Use this task to monitor for issues that prevent data collection and determine appropriate remediation actions.
Ensure that the Data Gateway for which you want to view the alarms is registered and operational.
Verify that the alarm pod status is healthy.
Use these steps to review the alarms to understand the issue affecting data collection, and take the remediation action, if necessary. Alternatively, you can log in to the alarms pod and view the alarms in the DgManager.yaml file.
| 1. | Navigate to Administration > Crosswork Manager > Application Management tab and then select Applications. |
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| 2. | In the Platform Infrastructure tile, click View Details.
The
Application Details window opens.
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| 3. | In the Microservices tab, filter by "alarms" to locate the alarm pod. |
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| 4. | To view alarm details, select Showtech requests under Actions. |
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| 5. | Review the information displayed in the Showtech Requests window. |
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| 6. | To export alarm logs, choose Publish and enter the destination server details. 
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Data Gateway alarms are displayed for review. You can download logs for further analysis and remediation.
If an alarm indicates an issue, perform the recommended remediation action.
Collect diagnostic logs from a specific Data Gateway for troubleshooting and support.
Use this procedure to download encrypted showtech logs from Crosswork Network Controller for a selected Data Gateway.
Showtech logs cannot be collected from the UI if the data gateway is in an ERROR state. In the DEGRADED state, if the OAM-Manager service is operational and not degraded, logs can be collected.
Confirm that the Data Gateway is not in ERROR state. If the gateway is in DEGRADED state and the OAM-Manager service is running and not degraded, logs may still be collected.
| 1. | Go to Administration > Data Gateway Management > Data gateways. |
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| 2. | Select the relevant Data Gateway. |
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| 3. | In the details page, click Actions and choose Download Showtech. 
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| 4. | Enter the desired passphrase. Make a note of this passphrase because it is required to decrypt the downloaded file. 
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| 5. | Click Download Showtech. The logs are downloaded in encrypted format.
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| 6. | After the download completes, decrypt the file using the command: openssl enc -d -aes-256-ctr -pbkdf2 -md sha512 -iter 100000 -in <showtech file> -out <decrypted filename> -pass pass:<password>
Example: openssl enc -d -aes-256-ctr -pbkdf2 -md sha3-512 -iter 100000 -in show-tech-file.tar.xz.enc -out show-tech-file.tar.xz -pass pass: myPassword
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The decrypted showtech file is available for analysis or to send to support.
Securely store the decrypted log file.
Provide the file to support as needed.
Download and decrypt service metrics for data gateway instances from the Crosswork UI.
Use this procedure to retrieve encrypted metrics files for all collection jobs from a Data Gateway for analysis or troubleshooting.
Ensure that you meet these requirements during decryption:
Use OpenSSL version 1.1.1i or newer. To check, use openssl version.
On a Mac, ensure that you are not using LibreSSL, as it does not support the necessary switches.
The metrics file must have a .tar.xz extension.
| 1. | Go to Administration > Data Gateway Management > Data gateway instances. |
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| 2. | Click the Data Gateway name for which you want to download the service metrics. |
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| 3. | In the Data Gateway details page, on the top-right corner, click Actions > Download Service Metrics. |
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| 4. | Enter a passphrase.
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| 5. | Click Download Service Metrics. The file is downloaded in encrypted format to your system’s default download folder. |
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| 6. | After the download, decrypt the file using the OpenSSL command. openssl enc -d -aes-256-ctr -pbkdf2 -md sha512 -iter 100000 -in <showtech file> -out <decrypted filename> -pass pass:<password>
Example: openssl enc -d -aes-256-ctr -pbkdf2 -md sha3-512 -iter 100000 -in show-tech-file.tar.xz.enc -out show-tech-file.tar.xz -pass pass: myPassword
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The decrypted metrics file is available for use or analysis.
Restart a data gateway virtual machine to restore or refresh its services.
Perform this task from the Crosswork Network Controller UI. When you reboot the data gateway, its functionality is paused until the VM is running again.
Be aware that rebooting the Data Gateway pauses its functionality until the virtual machine restarts.
| 1. | Go to Administration > Data Gateway Management > Data gateways. |
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| 2. | Click the Data Gateway name that you want to reboot. |
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| 3. | On the Crosswork Data Gateway details page, at the top-right, click Actions, then click Reboot. 
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| 4. | Click Reboot Gateway to confirm. 
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Once the reboot is complete, check the operational status of the data gateway in the Administration > Data Gateway Management > Data Gateway Instances window.