Overview
Objective
Detect anomalies and generate alerts that can be used for notifying an operator or triggering automation workflows.
Challenge
Discovering and repairing problems in the network usually involves manual network operator intervention and is time-consuming and error prone.
Solution
Incorporating Cisco Crosswork Change Automation and Cisco Crosswork Health Insights into Cisco Crosswork Network Controller gives service providers the ability to automate the process of discovering and remediating problems in the network by allowing an operator to match an alarm to pre-defined remediation tasks. These tasks will be performed after a defined Key Performance Indicator (KPI) threshold has been breached. Remediation can be implemented with or without the network operator’s approval, depending on the setting and preferences of the operator.
Using such closed-loop remediation reduces the time taken to discover and repair a problem while minimizing the risk of making a mistake and creating an additional error through high-stakes manual network operator intervention.
How Does it Work?
Smart Monitoring
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The Smart Monitoring feature helps operators collect, filter, and present the data in useable formats, such as graphs and tables. Operators can remain focused on their business goals while the configuration required for the data collection is done by the Cisco Crosswork Network Controller and Cisco Crosswork Change Automation and Cisco Crosswork Health Insights using the feature Zero-touch telemetry.
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By using a common collector to collect network device data over SNMP, CLI, and model-driven telemetry, and making it available as modelled data described in YANG, duplicate data collection is avoided, optimizing the load on both the devices and the network.
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Recommendation Engine analyzes network device hardware and software, configuration, and employs a pre-trained model built from data mining, producing KPI relevant recommendations facilitating per use-case monitoring.
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KPIs cover a wide range of statistics from CPU, memory, disk, layer 1/2/3 network counters, to per protocol, LPTS and ASIC statistics.
Smart Filtering
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Cisco Crosswork Health Insights builds dynamic detection and analytics modules that allow operators to monitor and see alerts on network events based on user-defined logic (KPI).
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Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) Alerting Logic can be:
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Simple static thresholds (TCA); e.g., CPU load above 90 percent.
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Moving average, standard-deviation, and percentile based, etc., e.g., CPU load above mean and staying there for five minutes.
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Streaming jobs which provide real-time alerts or batch jobs which run periodically.
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Customized for threshold values and visualization dashboards.
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Customized operator-created KPIs based on business logic.
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TCAs can be exported or integrated with other systems via HTTP, Slack, and socket interfaces.
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KPIs are associated with dashboards, which provide real-time and historical views of the data and corresponding TCAs.
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KPIs also provide purpose-built dashboards that go beyond raw data and provide valuable information in various infographic style charts and graphs useful for triaging and root-causing complex issues.
Smart Remediation
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Health Insights KPIs can be associated with Cisco Crosswork Change Automation (CCCA) playbooks, which can be either executed manually or via auto-remediation. Remediation workflow could be used to fix the issue or collect more data from the network devices. By proactively remediating the situation, instead of resorting to ad hoc debugging and unscheduled downtime, operators can save time and money, providing better QOE to their customers.
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Health Insights does the correlation of alerts or anomalies on the topology of the network, allowing easy visualization of the impact of events.