Cisco Crosswork Planning Design 7.2.x User Guide

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Cisco Crosswork Planning Design 7.2.x User Guide

External endpoints

Updated: August 14, 2026

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Explains how external endpoints act as identified entry and exit points for network traffic and how they are used for advanced routing scenarios.

An external endpoint is a Cisco Crosswork Planning object that

  • identifies specific entry (source) or exit (destination) points for demands, and

  • consists of one or more members that are defined as nodes, external ASes, or a combination of an external AS and external node.

By setting a demand’s source or destination to an external endpoint, you can simulate traffic going from multiple sources to a single destination, from a single source to multiple destinations, or multiple sources going to multiple destinations. Because of this flexibility, they are useful for specifying secondary entry and exit points in the event of failures.

Use cases for routing with external endpoints

To model basic IGP routing, demands are sourced or destined for nodes within the topology. To model basic inter-AS routing, the sources and destinations are neighboring external ASes, or a combination of the external AS and the peering node in that AS. However, more complex routing situations require the use of external endpoints as the source or destination. External endpoints can contain multiple member nodes and ASes, and you can specify when traffic enters or exits from each of them individually. This allows you to simulate routing within and between ASes where multiple traffic entry and exit points are used simultaneously. You can also prioritize where the traffic fails over to other nodes and ASes.

Use cases for both IGP and inter-AS routing with external endpoints include:

  • Simulating content caching failovers for in-network source of demands that are backed up by another in-network source. If connectivity is lost to the first, traffic is sourced from the second.

  • Simulating edge routing with a single entry point into the network edge and a specific failover point. Alternatively, you could model multiple entry points, depending on which is closest to the destination.

  • Simulating complex BGP routing policies from a transit provider. For example, you can specify a transit entry location and failover location per destination.

  • Simulating failover between peering ASes; for example, from one single-connection transit provider to another.