First Published: January 27, 2023

This document provides information about Cisco Crosswork Data Gateway 4.5 for Cloud applications, including features, compatibility information, known issues, and limitations.

Product Overview

Cisco Crosswork Data Gateway is a model-driven scalable data collection platform that enables real-time data collection from multi-protocol capable devices, thereby reducing the need for multiple collection points for multiple applications requiring data from the network.

Cisco Crosswork Data Gateway offers central visibility into services collecting data and the type of data being collected.

Cisco Crosswork Data Gateway is not a standalone product and is expected to be used with Crosswork Cloud applications. There is no separate software license needed for Cisco Crosswork Data Gateway.

Release Details

Cisco releases updated builds of Crosswork Data Gateway on the Cisco Support & Software Download site.

Cisco Crosswork Data Gateway can be installed into a data center using any of the platforms listed in the following table. The file used for deployment is unique to each of these environments.

Table 1. Crosswork Data Gateway 4.5 Release Details

Platform

Use

VMware

*.ova file.

Note 
When using the latest Mozilla Firefox version to download the .ova image, if the downloaded file has the extension as .dms, change the extension back to .ova before installation.

OpenStack Platform

*.qcow2 BIOS file.

Amazon EC2

.ami file.


Note

Direct upgrade from a previous Crosswork Data Gateway version is not supported. You must create a new VM with the same parameters that replaces the existing Crosswork Data Gateway.

What's New

This section lists the features and enhancements delivered in Crosswork Data Gateway 4.5 for Cloud Applications.

Table 2. New Features in Crosswork Data Gateway 4.5 for Cloud Applications

Feature

Description
Introduced data collection from an Amazon datacenter

Cisco Crosswork Data Gateway enables the periodic data collection from the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud web service and forwards the data to the Cisco Crosswork Cloud applications. These applications use the data for analysis and if required, alert an administrator for further action.

Additional vNIC to channel custom traffic

Provision to configure a dedicated vNIC (vNIC03) to route custom traffic such as SSH.

Enhancement to the Crosswork Data Gateway Interactive Console

The Interactive Console is improved with the following changes:

  • You can create an enrollment package file on your local machine by copying and pasting the package contents from the interactive console.

  • Using the controller session test option utility is available to test if an installed Crosswork Data Gateway is able to establish a connection with Crosswork Cloud. The utility also validates and analyzes the discrepancies between the resources (CPU and memory) assigned to the VM and the resources prescribed by the deployment profile.

Improvements to the Crosswork Data Gateway image

The AMI image format is enhanced to include DHCP support. After the image is booted, it enables registration with Crosswork Cloud.

Enhancements to the internal REST API

The remote debugging capabilities are improved using the internal REST API responsible for packet capture and tcpdump.

The following bug is resolved in this release:

Compatibility Information

Cisco Crosswork Data Gateway 4.5 for Cloud applications has been validated for use with the following Crosswork Cloud applications:

  • Cisco Crosswork Trust Insights is a cloud-based SaaS solution that reports on the integrity of devices and provides forensics for assured inventory.

  • Cisco Crosswork Cloud Traffic Analysis service is a hosted application that provides rich analysis, visualization, and optimization recommendations for network traffic flows.

Cisco Crosswork Data Gateway must be deployed using the Crosswork Cloud profile for use with Crosswork Cloud applications. For information on deployment, see Cisco Crosswork Data Gateway 4.5 Installation and Configuration Guide for Cloud Applications.

Table 1 shows software requirements for the supported virtualization platforms along with the physical and network resource requirements needed to support the Crosswork Data Gateway.

The resource requirements to install Crosswork Data Gateway are the same for all the data centers.

Table 3. Cisco Crosswork Data Gateway VM Requirements for Cloud applications

Requirement

Description

Data Center

VMware

  • VMware vCenter server 6.7, ESXi 6.5

  • VMware vCenter Server 7.0, ESXi 6.5 and 6.7.

    Attention 

    In VMware vCenter 6.5 (Flash and HTML5 interfaces) and 6.7 releases (6.7U1), the GUI installer does not process the OVF parameter list correctly. To prevent this issue, ensure that the following parameters in the vCenter vSphere Client > Deploy OVF Template > Customize template > 03. vNIC Role Assignment are specified as:

    • The interface for 03. vNIC Role Assignment > e. Control must be eth0

    • The interface for 03. vNIC Role Assignment > g. Northbound External Data must be eth0

    • The interface for 03. vNIC Role Assignment h. Southbound Data must be eth0

    • The 16. Controller Setting > a. Crosswork Controller IP should be crosswork.cisco.com

    • The 16 Controller Setting > b. Crosswork Controller Port should be 443

OpenStack

  • OpenStack OSP16

Amazon

  • Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute

Memory

32 GB

Total Disk space (Boot disk + Data disk)

74 GB (50 GB + 24 GB)

vCPU

8

Interfaces

Minimum: 1

Maximum: 4

Crosswork Data Gateway can be deployed with either 1, 2, 3, or 4 interfaces as per the combinations below:

No. of NICs

vNIC0

vNIC1

vNIC2

vNIC3
1

  • Management Traffic

  • Control/Data Traffic

  • Device Access Traffic

—

—

—
2

  • Management Traffic

  • Control/Data Traffic

  • Device Access Traffic

—

—
3

  • Management Traffic

  • Control/Data Traffic

  • Device Access Traffic

—

4

—

—

—

Custom traffic

  • Management traffic: for accessing the Interactive Console and troubleshooting the Crosswork Data Gateway VM.

  • Control/Data traffic: to receive configuration of collection jobs from the Crosswork Cloud and to forward collected data to the Crosswork Cloud.

    Important 

    Crosswork Data Gateway can connect to the Cloud only when the Control/Data interface has access to the Internet.

  • Device access traffic: for device management and telemetry data.

  • Custom traffic: for routing the custom traffic such as SSH traffic.

IP Addresses

One, two, or three IPv4 or IPv6 addresses based on the number of interfaces you choose to use.

Note 

Crosswork does not support dual stack configurations. Therefore, ALL addresses for the environment must be either IPv4 or IPv6.

NTP Servers

The IPv4 or IPv6 addresses or host names of the NTP servers you plan to use. If you want to enter multiple NTP servers, separate them with spaces. These should be the same NTP servers you use to synchronize devices, clients, and servers across your network.

Note 
Confirm that the NTP IP address or host name is reachable on the network or installation fails.

The Crosswork Data Gateway host and virtual machine must be synchronized to an NTP server or the enrollment with Crosswork Cloud may not go through.

DNS Servers

The IPv4 or IPv6 addresses of the DNS servers you plan to use. If you want to enter multiple DNS servers, separate them with spaces. These should be the same DNS servers you use to resolve host names across your network.

DNS Search Domain

The search domain you want to use with the DNS servers (for example, cisco.com). You can only have one search domain.
(optional) Proxy Server

URL of an optional management network proxy server.

If your environment requires an HTTP or HTTPS proxy in order to access URLs on the public Internet, you must configure a proxy server for the Cisco Crosswork Data Gateway to successfully connect to the Crosswork Cloud service.

(optional) Syslog Server

Hostname, IPv4, or IPv6 address of an optional syslog server.

(optional) Auditd Server

Hostname, IPv4, or IPv6 address of an optional Auditd server.

Important

With these requirements, additional settings that must be configured to install Crosswork Data Gateway on Amazon EC2. For information on the EC2 requirements, see the Section: Amazon EC2 Settings in Cisco Crosswork Data Gateway 4.5 Installation and Configuration Guide for Cloud Applications.

Product Documentation

The following table lists the guides provided for Cisco Crosswork Data Gateway for Cloud applications.

Table 4. Crosswork Data Gateway for Cloud applications Documentation

Document Title

What is included

Cisco Crosswork Data Gateway 4.5 Release Notes for Cloud Applications

This document.

Provides an overview of the product, compatibility information, and important information that should be considered before using the product.

Cisco Crosswork Data Gateway 4.5 Installation and Configuration Guide for Cloud Applications

  • System requirements

  • Installation prerequisites

  • Installation instructions

  • Upgrade instructions

  • Uninstalling Crosswork Data Gateway

  • Configure Crosswork Data Gateway
API Documentation Advanced users can extend the Cisco Crosswork functionality using the APIs. API documentation is available on Cisco Devnet.

Related Product Documentation

This section provides links to additional related documentation for Cisco Crosswork Data Gateway.

You can access documentation for all Cisco Crosswork products at https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/cloud-systems-management/crosswork-network-automation/tsd-products-support-series-home.html.

Security

Cisco takes great strides to ensure that all our products conform to the latest industry recommendations. We firmly believe that security is an end-to-end commitment and are here to help secure your entire environment. Please work with your Cisco account team to review the security profile of your network.

For details on how we validate our products, see Cisco Secure Products and Solutions and Cisco Security Advisories.

If you have questions or concerns regarding the security of any Cisco products, please open a case with the Cisco Customer Experience team and include details about the tool being used and any vulnerabilities it reports.

Support and Downloads

The Cisco Support and Downloads website provides online resources to download documentation, software, and tools. Use these resources to install and configure the software and to troubleshoot and resolve technical issues with Cisco products and technologies.

Access to most tools on the Cisco Support and Downloads website requires a Cisco.com user ID and password.

For more information, see https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/index.html.

Obtain Additional Information

Information about Cisco products, services, technologies, and networking solutions is available from various online sources.