About Catalyst Center Platform

Catalyst Center platform

Catalyst Center provides an extensible platform that Cisco customers and partners can use to create value-added applications that can be built on top of its native capabilities. You can optimize end-to-end IT processes, reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), and develop new value networks by leveraging the Catalyst Center platform features to enhance the overall network experience.

  • Intent APIs: The Intent APIs are northbound REST APIs that expose specific capabilities of Catalyst Center platform. The Intent APIs provide policy-based abstraction of business intent, allowing you to focus on an outcome to achieve instead of struggling with the mechanisms that implement that outcome. The APIs conform to the REST API architectural style. The APIs are simple, extensible, and secure to use. They support the standard REST methods, which include GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE operations through HTTPS.

  • Integration Flows: Integration capabilities are part of westbound interfaces. To meet the need to scale and accelerate operations in modern data centers, IT operators require intelligent, end-to-end work flows built with open APIs. Catalyst Center platform provides mechanisms for integrating Assurance workflows and data with third-party IT Service Management (ITSM) solutions.

  • Events and Notifications Services: Supported services are available for Cisco Catalyst Assurance events and Catalyst Center SWIM events to be captured and forwarded to third-party applications.


Note


The Catalyst Center platform application is accessible to a user with a SUPER-ADMIN-ROLE. Log in as a user with a SUPER-ADMIN-ROLE to view the Catalyst Center platform and do tasks through its GUI. Additionally, as a user with a SUPER-ADMIN-ROLE, you can create a custom role with read, write, or deny permissions to various platform functionality (APIs, bundles, events, and reports). From the main menu, choose System > Users & Roles > Role Based Action Access Control to access this feature.


Intent APIs

The intent APIs are northbound REST APIs that expose specific capabilities of Catalyst Center platform. The Intent APIs provide policy-based abstraction of business intent, allowing you to focus on achieving the outcome rather than struggling with the mechanisms that implement it.

The APIs conform to REST API architectural styles that are simple, extensible, and secure. They support standard REST methods, which include GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE operations through HTTPS. A REST endpoint accepts and returns HTTPS messages containing JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) documents. You can use any programming language to generate the messages and the JSON documents that contain the API methods. These APIs are governed by the Catalyst Center Role Based Access Control (RBAC) rules. As a security measure, users must authenticate successfully before using the API.

The Intent APIs are listed in the API catalog located in the Catalyst Center platform GUI. You can view this catalog by navigating to Platform > Developer Toolkit > APIs . For information about the rate limit of an API, click the Features tab in the API details page. The intent APIs have a default API rate limit of 50 requests.

About events and notifications

Catalyst Center platform supports the ability to send custom notifications when specific events are triggered. This is valuable for third-party systems that take business actions based upon event type. For example, when a device in the network is not compliant, a custom application may want to receive notifications and do a software upgrade.

You can view a list of available events for this release. From the main menu, choose Platform > Manage > Configurations. These events can be customized for IT Service Management (ITSM) incidents.