Support for OS Licenses

Catalyst Center supports these new perpetual device licenses for switches:

• OS Essentials

• OS Advantage

Enhancements to the License Manager window for OS licenses:

• Overview tab: displays information about the purchased, used, and available OS licenses.

• Licenses tab: displays the number of total, expiring, and noncompliant OS licenses.

• Devices tab: the procedure for change license level is enhanced to support OS license conversion and removal.

See License Manager overview, View historical trends for license consumption, and Change license level.

Support for Cisco Networking Subscription Licenses

Catalyst Center supports the following new Cisco Networking Subscription (CNS) license types:

• CNS Essentials

• CNS Advantage

The License Manager window has the following enhancements to support the CNS licenses:

• In the Overview tab, Catalyst Center also displays the information about the purchased, used, and available CNS licenses.

• In the Licenses tab, Catalyst Center displays the total, about to expire, and out of compliance licenses details for CNS licenses.

• In the Devices tab, the change license level procedure is enhanced to support the CNS license conversion and removal.

• In the Reporting tab, you can now click the device name to view the corresponding license details. For wireless controllers, you can click the AP number link to view the AP license and compliance details.

See License Manager overview, Visualize license use and expiration, View historical trends for license consumption, Change license level, and Configure licenses for worldwide safe mode-enabled devices.

Upgrade Summary Report

Open this new report to view the results of the latest upgrade of Catalyst Center and its applications.

See View an upgrade summary report.

Ability to Edit the Cisco ISE FQDN in Day-N

In earlier releases, you can’t edit the FQDN of the Cisco ISE server after Cisco ISE is added to Catalyst Center.

Starting from this release, you can edit the FQDN of the Cisco ISE server after Cisco ISE is added to Catalyst Center.

See Configure authentication and policy servers.

Enhancement to Task Management

You can manually stop in-progress tasks in the Tasks window.

See View, edit, stop, and delete tasks.

IP Address Manager Enhancements

In earlier releases, IP address pools on Catalyst Center were always synchronized with the IPAM; you couldn't skip the synchronization. In this release, you can choose whether to synchronize the IP address pools with the IPAM.

In earlier releases, when you updated an existing IPAM, you could change only the password. In this release, you can change the server name, server URL, username, password, and view of the IPAM. You can also choose to synchronize the IP address pools on Catalyst Center with the IPAM during the update.

See Configure an IP address manager.

Introduction of v2 System Notification Events

With this release, the existing System Notification events are deprecated and new v2 events are introduced.

See Subscribe to system event notifications to edit your subscriptions.

Smart Call Home to Smart Transport Transition for Smart License-Enabled Device

Smart Call Home (SCH) support for Smart Licensing reaches end-of-life from Catalyst Center 2.3.7.6. If you’re using SCH with smart licensing, we recommend that you transition to Smart Transport.

See Sync licensing connection mode.

Enhancements to Certificate Management UI

System Certificates, Trusted Certificates, and Device Certificates UI are modified to have a uniform layout.

See Update the Catalyst Center server certificate.

SD-Access Image Compatibility Checks

You can enable or disable the check for SD-Access image compatibility using the system settings menu. By default, the SD-Access image compatibility check is enabled.

See Cisco SD-Access Compatibility Matrix.

Upload Resource Utilization Details to CSSM: Change to Prerequisites

In earlier releases, to upload resource utilization details to CSSM, devices must have NETCONF enabled and devices must be added to the site. Effective with this release, devices don't have to have NETCONF enabled, and devices don't have to be added to the site.

See Upload resource use details to CSSM.

Unification of the Tasks and Work Items Window

With the unification of the Tasks and Work Items windows, you can view all tasks and work items on one window, the Tasks window.

See View, search, and filter for task and work item details and View and discard work items.

Usability Enhancement of the Tasks Window

By enhancing the usability of the Tasks window, you can view, search, filter for, and manage your tasks and work items more easily and quickly.

See View, search, and filter for task and work item details, View, edit, stop, and delete tasks, and View and discard work items.

Error Message Enhancement

For all failed tasks, an error message with a trace ID is displayed on the GUI. The trace ID provides a hint to analyze the error log quickly.

See View, search, and filter for task and work item details.

Update the KGV Bundle

You can request a new Known Good Values (KGV) download workflow by clearing all the stale and suspended integrity verification (IV) workflows, if there are any.

See Update the KGV Bundle.

Enhancement to Certificate Management

To provide an enhanced user experience, the Certificate Management user interface is revamped and the navigation path for Trusted Certificates, System Certificates, Certificate Authority and Device Certificate is changed to System > Settings > Certificates.

See Manage device certificates, Certificate and private key support, and Configure trusted certificates.

Cisco Software-Defined Access Compatibility Matrix Information in Catalyst Center.

To provide seamless fabric network provisioning, the SD-Access fabric nodes hardware and software attributes are compared with SD-Access compatibility matrix information in System > Settings > SD-Access Compatibility Matrix.

See Cisco SD-Access Compatibility Matrix.

Third-Party Trusted Certificate Check

With a Third-Party Trusted Certificate check, Catalyst Center allows you to validate if any of the third-party trusted certificates are revoked, expired, or close to expiration. You can perform this check by initiating a validation run and choosing Appliance Infrastructure Status as Validation Set(s) Selection.

System event notifications are generated when a third-party trusted certificate has been revoked, has expired, or is close to expiration.

See Use the Validation tool, View Validation Run Details, and Subscribe to system event notifications.