Basic Concepts
Cisco Crosswork Change Automation and Health Insights makes extensive use of three basic concepts. It is helpful to be familiar with them before you get started.
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Tags: Tags will be familiar from other Web applications. They are simple text strings you can attach to objects to help group them. Cisco Crosswork Change Automation and Health Insights comes with a short list of ready-made tags used to group network devices. You can create your own tags and use them to identify, find, and group devices for a variety of purposes. For example, in addition to type and geolocation, which are already stored when you on-board devices, you may want to identify and group them by their location in your network topology (Spine vs. Leaf), or the function they serve on your network (Provider vs. ProviderEdge). Tags are especially useful when setting up KPI monitoring, as you can apply a KPI to every member of a tagged group. You will want to develop your own tags for your purposes, and rework them as needed to meet changing needs.
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Providers: Cisco Crosswork Change Automation and Health Insights does not perform network discovery, inventory collection, monitoring, or configuration changes directly. Instead, it relies on providers, such as Cisco Network Services Orchestrator and Cisco WAN Automation Engine, to deliver these special services. The provider family determines the type of service that provider supplies to Cisco Crosswork Change Automation and Health Insights, and the parameters unique to that service, which must be configured. Because these providers are separate applications, you will be asked to register them and provide values for their unique parameters when you set up Cisco Crosswork Change Automation and Health Insights. This architecture permits Cisco Crosswork Change Automation and Health Insights to devote all of its resources to processing and interpreting network events and rolling out changes in response to these events.
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Credential Profiles: For Cisco Crosswork Change Automation and Health Insights to be able to access a device or to interact with a provider, it must be able to present credentials. Rather than entering credentials each time they are needed, you can instead create credential profiles to securely store this information. The platform supports unique credentials for each type of access protocol, and allows you to bundle multiple protocols and their corresponding credentials in a single profile. Devices that use the same credentials can share a credential profile. For example, if all of your routers in a particular building share a single SSH user ID and password, you can create a single credential profile to allow Cisco Crosswork Change Automation and Health Insights to access and manage them.