Cisco Crosswork Planning runs on the Cisco Crosswork infrastructure and is part of the Cisco Crosswork Network Automation suite of products.

Cisco Crosswork Planning provides tools to create and maintain a model of the current network through the continual monitoring and analysis of the network, and the traffic demands that are placed on it. At a given time, this network model contains all relevant information about a network, including topology, configuration, and traffic information. You can use this information as a basis for analyzing the impact on the network due to changes in traffic demands, paths, node and link failures, network optimizations, or other changes.

These are some of the important features of Cisco Crosswork Planning.

• Traffic engineering and network optimization—Compute TE LSP configuration to meet service level requirements, perform capacity management, and perform local or global optimization in order to maximize efficiency of deployed network resources.

• Demand engineering—Examine the impact on network traffic flow of adding, removing, or modifying traffic demands on the network.

• Topology and predictive analysis—Observe the impact to network performance of changes in the network topology, which is driven either by design or by network failures.

• TE tunnel programming—Examine the impact of modifying tunnel parameters, such as the tunnel path and reserved bandwidth.

• Class of service (CoS)-aware bandwidth on demand—Examine existing network traffic and demands, and admit a set of service-class-specific demands between routers.

Cisco Crosswork Planning comprises the following two components. These components run independently of each other and you can enable/disable them based on your requirements.

• Cisco Crosswork Planning Collector

  Cisco Crosswork Planning Collector consists of a set of services that create, maintain, and archive a model of the current network through continual monitoring and analysis of the network, and the traffic demands that are placed on it.

• Cisco Crosswork Planning Design

  Cisco Crosswork Planning Design is a network design and planning tool that helps network engineers and operators predict growth in their network, simulate failures, and optimize the network design to meet performance objectives while minimizing cost.

Cisco Crosswork Planning lets you model, simulate, and analyze failures, design changes, and impact of traffic growth, as well as optimize your network for maximum efficiency. For example, with Cisco Crosswork Planning models and tools, you can answer a wide variety of questions about traffic management.

Planning:

• Where is traffic going in the network?

• When and where will my network run out of capacity?

• How do I convert my growth forecasts into upgrade plans?

Engineering:

• How can I better distribute traffic throughout the network?

• How can I design for differentiated quality of service?

• Where is my network most vulnerable to failure, and how can I mitigate it?

Operations:

• How can I visualize the current health of the network?

• What caused the outage experienced earlier today?

• How would a current failure affect the network at peak time tomorrow?

• Which VPN customers will be affected by a planned outage or by an unplanned failure?

Cisco Crosswork Planning runs on the Crosswork infrastructure. Cisco Crosswork Planning Design and Cisco Crosswork Planning Collector are packaged as separate components and can be enabled/disabled as per your requirements. These two applications run independently of each other. The communication between Cisco Crosswork Planning Design and the archive on the Cisco Crosswork Planning Collector to import the network models happens over well-defined APIs.