Note: Service Health is not genearlly available yet. At this stage, it is available for pre-launch laboratory evaluation only. Engage your account team if you are interested in participating in the evaluation.

• Health status of sub-services (device, tunnel) to a map when a single service is selected.

• Service logical dependency tree and help the operator in troubleshooting in case of degradation by locating where the problem resides, an indication of possible symptoms, and impacting metrics in case of degradation.

• Historical view of services health status up to 60 days.

Segment Routing Over IPv6 (SRv6) Visualization and Provisioning

Starting with this release, SR-TE policies are now separated into either SRv6 or SR-MPLS policies. SRv6 and SR-MPLS policies (including link details) are shown separately in the UI.

SRv6 visualization supports the following:

• SRv6 topology

• ISIS IGP

• Flexible Algorithm information and topology

• PCC-initiated SRv6 policies (including IGP paths)

SRv6 provisioning supports the following:

• SRv6 provisioning

• L3VPN over SRv6 TE ODN provisioning

In addition to previously supported IPv4 policy data, the following SRv6 policy data is also supported:

• SRv6 Binding SID

• Computed and reported SR paths (SRv6 adjacency and node SIDs)

Flexible Algorithm Visualization

The ability to view up to two Flexible Algorithm IDs in your network can be enabled in the Traffic Engineering topology view (Services & Traffic Engineering > Traffic Engineering.

Visualization of native SR path

Visualizing the native path using the traceroute SR-MPLS multipath command to get the actual paths between the source and the destination can be achieved using Path Query. With Cisco Crosswork Network Controller, a traceroute command runs on the source device for the destination TE-Router ID and assists in retrieving the paths.

Scale

To support large scale deployment, the applications that make up Cisco Crosswork Network Controller (Cisco Crosswork Optimization, Cisco Crosswork Active Topology, and other applications) are built with workload and endpoint load balancing using the Cisco Crosswork infrastructure's cluster architecture.

Overall scale support has increased significantly to 10K devices, 100K IGP interfaces, 60K transport policies (SR, RSVP, SRv6), and 200K VPN services (L2VPN, L3VPN).

High availability

• Kubernetes-based cluster architecture for extensibility, scalability, and high availability. The cluster can include up to three “hybrid” nodes and three additional “worker” nodes. Cisco Crosswork applications are installed on top of the integrated cluster infrastructure.

• High availability is built into Cisco Crosswork’s cluster architecture. Users get alarms when nodes in the cluster have issues, and can restart or re-instantiate nodes at will. Load balancing is automatic across the cluster.

• Crosswork applications support high availability with multi-instance microservices.

Cisco Crosswork Data Gateway and Data Collection

• View Crosswork Data Gateway profile information in Cisco Crosswork UI.

• New Operational State “Not Ready”.

• Enhanced Monitoring and Troubleshooting of the Crosswork Data Gateway.

• Add custom ports for SNMP Trap and Syslog collection.

• SNMP and gNMI collection enhancements.

See the Cisco Crosswork Data Gateway and Data Collection 3.0 release notes for additional new features.

User Interface/Usability

• Addition of a detailed topology map legend.

• Enhanced usability for troubleshooting provisioning state failures with the addition of information icons and links that detail specific error information, recommendations on how to fix, and various actions that can be taken to fix failures.

• NSO actions, such as check-sync, sync-from, re-deploy, reconcile, etc., are available through the Cisco Crosswork Network Controller provisioning UI.

• Enhanced cross-launches to NSO based Provisioning, Alarms, and Events.

• Enhanced, unified, integrated user interface and topology that combines all components within a single pane of glass.

• The dashboard in the Home page provides an at-a-glance operational summary of the network being managed, including reachability and operational status of devices, as well as transport policies and VPN services. Additional dashlets might be shown in the dashboard depending on which Cisco Crosswork applications are installed.

Device Management

• Addition of NSO device sync integration

• Integration of Cisco Crosswork Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP) enables onboarding and provisioning new IOS-XR devices automatically, resulting in faster deployment of new hardware at a lower operating cost. Operators can quickly and easily bring up devices using a Cisco-certified software image and a day-zero software configuration.

• Addition of Cisco Plug and Play (PnP) ZTP enables secure onboarding and provisioning of new IOS-XE devices, similar to the process for IOS-XR devices.

Optimization/Congestion Mitigation

• Segment Routing Over IPv6 (SRv6) Visualization: Supports SRv6 topology, ISIS IGP, FlexAlgo information and topology, PCC-initiated SRv6 policies (including IGP paths), etc.

• Flexible Algorithm Visualization

• Maximun SID Depth (MSD) Enforcement

• Local Congestion Mitigation (LCM): Updated architecture to support higher scalability, new landing page, a timestamp of when the last recommendation was made now displayed on the landing page and dashboard, a new Urgency field displayed in the Operational Dashboard indicating the severity of the issue to be addressed, the ability t oenable automatic repair of degraded LCM policies, etc.

• Visualize Link Aggregation Group (LAG) link details

• SR-TE Policy Delay Metric Visualization

• SR-TE Multiple Path Candidate (MCP) Visualization

• Binding SID (B-SID) Policy Visualization

• Native Segment Routing Path Over Inter-AS Option C Visualization

• Cisco SR-PCE HA pairs

• Cisco Crosswork Network Controller and Cisco Crosswork Optimization Engine API: New Data for link, node, SR-policy.

See the Cisco Crosswork Optimization Engine 3.1.0 release notes for additional new features.

Transport/VPN Provisioning

• Provision, update, and delete SRv6 policies and ODN templates on head-end devices using NSO services model.

• Support for L3VPN over SRv6 TE ODN provisioning.

• L3VPN Route Policy enhancement to reference external route policy with sample Function Pack (FP) model.

Topology

• Service topology view in Cisco Crosswork Network Controller capable of showing services with complex key.

• Configurable L2 topology discovery sources can be enabled and disabled, allowing you to select which L2 collection sources are collected. This offers performance benefits, as devices are not constantly polled for data that is not needed.

• Ability to save a useful map display and layout as a named custom view so that it can be retrieved easily without having to rearrange the map each time.

• Device grouping functionality for easier device management. Ability to organize devices in groups, to create a hierarchy of groups and to visualize groups of devices on the topology map.

RESTCONF APIs

New RESTCONF API functions:

• Cisco Crosswork Network Controller RSVP-TE RESTCONF tunnels API is newly added and reports the discovered TE tunnels and operation status. HCO/Netfusion and the customer can use these LSP tunnel information to manage the network.

• Cisco Crosswork Network Controller RESTCONF topology:

  • SR-TE : Added SRLB, MSD and other important data in the topology API report. The newly added data support is important for HCO/Netfusion to manage the network.

  • SRv6 : Added SRv6 report for the topology API.

  • L2 topology : Added L2 topology report so that user can understand the layer 2 network connectivity. Now the topology API supports both L2 topology and L3 topology.

Datalytics

Integration of Cisco Crosswork Health Insights and Change Automation enables closed-loop control based on performance telemetry.

Documentation

• The Cisco Crosswork Infrastructure 4.1 and Applications Installation Guide covers installation of the cluster and installation of Crosswork applications on top of the infrastructure. There is no individual installation guide for Cisco Crosswork Network Controller.

• The Cisco Crosswork Infrastructure 4.1 and Applications Administration Guide covers setup and maintenance of the Crosswork system. There is no longer a Getting Started Guide for Cisco Crosswork Network Controller.

• The Cisco Crosswork Network Controller 3.0.x Solution Workflow Guide provides an overview of the solution and its supported use cases. It walks users step-by-step through various common usage scenarios to illustrate how users can work with the solution components to achieve the desired benefits.

6.6.3

7.1.2

yes

yes

7.2.1

7.3.1

yes

7.3.2

yes

yes

yes

yes

yes

yes

yes

yes

7.4.1

yes

yes

yes

yes

yes

yes

yes

yes

17.5.1

yes

17.6.1

Service Health is for pre-launch lab use only.

Service Health

Service Health provides CPU and memory consumption for a device per core. Each device may have multiple cores. When CPU or memory consumption exceeds the thresholds configured in the device profile, (reports as being high), it is marked as degraded. To check, go to Administration > Heuristic Packages > Configuration Profiles and select the information icon next to the configuration profile name, examine CPU or memory profile configuration information. For CPU usage, a value over 70% exceeds the threshold and is marked as degraded. For memory usage, a value under 10% is marked as degraded. The threshold value shown, for both CPU and memory, is an average of the multiple cores reported on a device. View the Failed Subexpressions and Metrics table information where you can examine the multiple core values shown in the Expression Value column used to average a device’s threshold. Only certain cores may be raising the threshold, while others are not. Use these details to determine which core CPU or memory is degraded so to troubleshoot as necessary.

Service Health

Explicit path is not supported for SRv6 policy. However, when provisioning an SRv6 policy, if the candidate path is configured prior to enabling SRv6, the Explicit Path option is visible and can be committed with no warning and the explicit path config is ignored when SRv6 policy is pushed to the devices. If SRv6 is enabled first, before configuring the path, the Explicit Path option is not visible due to no SRv6 explicit path support.

Provisioning an SRv6 policy and configuring the Path

Custom templates cannot be created using the GUI, nor can their contents be visualized in the GUI. Custom templates created offline can be applied to service models via GUI and API. However, topology map overlays and service configuration views will not display custom template configuration.

Provisioning GUI.

The Optimization Engine GUI shows TE metric type instead of Latency metric type for SR policies created from the Optimization Engine GUI with Latency as the metric type.

SR policy provisioning from Optimization Engine GUI

Cisco Crosswork Data Gateway operational state may transition to error state when there is little or no traffic for an extended period of time. Operational state will be updated when the traffic returns to normal levels.

Admin > Data Gateway Management

The error, "Get Dense Table Operation" may be shown in the Collection Job UI for the SNMP collection type when a large number of devices (300+) are reloaded in an environment. SNMP collection can be resumed by rebooting the VM from the Troubleshooting menu in Cisco Crosswork Data Gateway.

Cisco Crosswork Data Gateway

Services can be provisioned to devices when devices are not mapped to Cisco Crosswork Network Controller or are operationally down, provided they are reachable and in sync with NSO.

Provisioning GUI

After a Cisco NSO backup and restore operation, Cisco Crosswork Network Controller discovers all services from Cisco NSO. Any delta in services after the NSO backup operation will be lost once the backup is restored.

Cisco NSO

Cisco Crosswork Network Controller can discover services through transit nodes (SR policy, etc.) for non-Cisco vendor devices. These devices will be in Unmanaged state and services cannot be provisioned on these unmanaged devices.

Provisioning GUI

Multiple users performing CRUD (create, read, update and delete) operations simultaneously through the Provisioning GUI may encounter failures when one of the sessions is performing bulk operations (e.g., edit route-policy on 100+ devices). NSO configures relevant changes on the network devices and may not respond to subsequent requests in an adequate timeframe, leading to a timeout.

Provisioning GUI

A device that is also an SR-PCE provider might become unreachable when the device alone is deleted from the Device Management page. To avoid this, add SR-PCE as a provider with a /32 mask.

Device Management, SR-PCE Provider

Segment hops are not visible on the map following multiple add device, delete device, and re-add device operations. Workaround is to restart Optimization Engine from Administration > Crosswork Manager.

Device Management, Optimization Engine GUI

This document

Shared installation guide for all the Cisco Crosswork applications and their common infrastructure. Covers:

• System requirements

• Installation prerequisites

• Installation instructions

• Upgrade instructions

Shared administration guide for all the Cisco Crosswork applications and their common infrastructure. Covers:

• Managing clusters and data gateway

• Data collection

• High availability

• Backup and restore

• Onboard and manage devices

• Zero touch provisioning

• Set up maps

• Managing users, access and security

• Maintain system health

• Solution overview

• Supported use cases and their benefits.

• Procedures for achieving the desired outcome for real-life usage scenarios using the Cisco Crosswork Network Controller UI.

Lists of licenses and notices for open source software used in Cisco Crosswork Network Controller 3.0.x.

API Documentation

Advanced users can extend the Cisco Crosswork functionality using the APIs. API documentation is available on Cisco Devnet.