About this Document

This chapter provides information about the intended audience of the Cisco Managed Services Accelerator (MSX) platform, what's new in the current release, and related documentation.

Cisco Managed Services Accelerator (MSX) Platform Overview

Cisco Managed Services Accelerator (MSX) is an open software platform that enables service providers to create and manage services across physical and virtual network elements. The MSX solution utilizes network function virtualization and enables service providers to provide their customers a flexible selection of services that are easily customized through a self-service portal. It reduces the costs for service creation, customer acquisition, service fulfillment, time to repair, and maintenance. With Cisco MSX solution, you can automate end-to-end provisioning for different use cases and service topologies. Each release of the MSX provides out-of-box capabilities to orchestrate particular use cases, also called service packs (such as, Cisco MSX SD-WAN, Cisco MSX SD-Branch, and Cisco MSX Managed Devices). The MSX service packs are a suite of prepackaged software capabilities that fully automate the end-to-end service creation including ordering, service chaining, orchestration, service assurance, user self care, real time performance reporting, and user-defined policy changes. With these fully validated service level packages, end customers can quickly turn on, control, and ensure cloud-based managed services offered by the service provider. For detailed information about MSX solution, see Cisco Managed Services Accelerator (MSX) Solution Overview Guide.

For information on MSX platform or service pack installation, see the latest version of Cisco MSX Installation and Upgrade Guide on cisco.com.

What’s New in Cisco MSX Platform

Feature

Description

Device Password Retrieval Using Serial Number

The Cisco MSX platform allow users with administrator privileges to retrieve the deleted or existing device password using the serial number.

For more information, see Retrieving Deleted Password.

Addition of Tag on Service Offers

The Cisco MSX platform provides a set of labels or tags such as Preview on the service offer that is available on the Tenant Workspace > Offer Catalog window.

For more information, see Assigning Offers to Tenants.

Smart Account License Validation

The tenants can log into MSX using the Cisco.com SSO credentials and select a service offer for subscription. The Cisco MSX platform provides capabilities to validate the list of smart accounts, virtual accounts, and licenses associated with the Cisco.com user's account. Only based on the authentication the users are allowed to proceed with the offer subscription process.

For more information, see the Validating Smart Account License Using API.

Billable Events Management

The Cisco MSX platform provides event-based billing capabilities for the tenants. The events that are registered from the service pack are determined as billable and monetary values are assigned by operators for different service pack-based events in the Cisco MSX. The event generation and billing calculation are scheduled as per the pre-configured interval.

For more information, see the Managing Billing.

Incident Tracking System Integration with the Tenants

The Cisco MSX platform provides an extended capability to integrate an incident tracking system with all the MSX tenants. You can create, update, resolve, or close an incident ticket.

For more information, see the Integrating Incident Tracking System with Cisco MSX.

Device Compliance Vulnerability Monitoring and Email Notification

The Cisco MSX platform now detects and reports the software vulnerability for both Cisco devices and third-party devices. MSX sends an email notification to all the tenants regarding the captured vulnerability information of the registered devices.

For more information, see the Managing Device Compliance Vulnerability Using API

Enhanced SSO Integration Using Okta

The Cisco MSX platform integrates with Okta to enhance existing MSX identity capabilities and onboard enterprise users into MSX.

The Cisco IDP will validate one of the initial users using cisco.com details and create them as a tenant. Any subsequent users will be authenticated based on their enterprise IDP.

For more information, see the Configuring SAML-Based IDPs on MSX.

Identity Management Enhancements

The Cisco MSX platform enables the users to be placed into groups and allows the administrator to apply for roles and permissions at the group level rather than to individual users.

For more information, see the Configuring SAML-Based IDPs on MSX.

Dynamic Tenant Creation from Cisco.com Account

The Cisco MSX platform now generates a tenant for a user logging into MSX for the first time using cisco.com credentials. MSX extracts the company name attribute from the user's cisco.com profile for creating a tenant (federated user).

Note 

At least one user per Tenant must have a cisco.com login to use this functionality on Cisco MSX.

For more information, see the Generating Tenant Dynamically from Cisco.com Account.

Tenant Groups Enhancement

The Cisco MSX platform now displays all the available Tenant Groups in a list format and allows you to manage Tenant Groups effectively.

For more information, see Managing Tenant Groups.

Device Password Retrieval Using Serial Number

The Cisco MSX platform allow users with administrator privileges to retrieve the deleted or existing device password using the serial number.

For more information, see Retrieving Deleted Password.

MSX Portal Access for Users without Any Subscription

Users accessing the MSX portal with no subscriptions will see the Offer Catalog window with the services that they can subscribe to.

For more information, see Subscribing Application from Tenant Workspace.

Audience

This guide is designed for administrators who use Cisco MSX platform to configure basic operations after installing MSX.

The platform addendum should be used in conjunction with this guide.

Logging In and Logging Out of the MSX Portal

To log into the MSX portal, enter the following URL in your web browser address field, where server-ip is the IP address or fully qualified domain name (FQDN) name of the MSX server:

https://<server-ip>/vms or https://<your_portal_fqdn>

Depending on your network configuration, the first time your browser connects to the Cisco MSX web server, you may have to update your client browser to trust the security certificate of the server. This ensures the security of the connection between your client and the Cisco MSX web server.

Your user account privileges determine what you can see and do in the user interface. For information on Cisco MSX users and the actions they can perform, see Managing User Roles.

If you are using any third-party applications with MSX, you can configure single-sign on (SSO) to access these applications from MSX. For more information about configuring single-sign on, see Configuring Single Sign-On.

To log out, in the left pane of the MSX portal, click Logout.

Accessing MSX APIs

In Cisco MSX, OAuth 2.0 access tokens are used to make API requests to the application on behalf of a user. After the user is authenticated using the Cisco MSX credentials, they can obtain the access token which is shown in the procedure below. The same token can be used on each API request to indicate the request is executed on behalf of the user.

Using this procedure, you can use the MSX APIs for platform or service-pack operations.

Before you begin

Configure authorization server (Auth Server) properties. For more information, see Configuring Authorization Server Properties.

Procedure

Step 1

Obtain the MSX client credentials.

Use the credential for logging in to the MSX portal. If you do not have these credentials, contact your Service Provider Administrator.
Step 2

Obtain an access token from the MSX authorization Server.

Use the following curl command to get the token.

curl -k -d 'grant_type=password&username=*********&password=*****' -H "Content-Type: 
application/x-www-form-urlencoded" -H "Authorization: Basic *******" -X POST 
https://<MSX_URL>/idm/v2/token
Step 3

Send the access token to an API.

After obtaining the access token, send the token to an MSX API in an HTTP authorization header. The below example shows a sample curl command for updating the current password policies. Use the access_token that was obtained in Step 2 to run this curl command. 

curl -k -X PUT --header "Content-type: application/json" --header "accept:
application/json" --header "authorization: Bearer <ACCESS_TOKEN>" -d '{ "accountLocking": {
"enabled": true, "lockoutDurationMin": 30, "lockoutFailCount": 3,
"lockoutFailIntervalSec": 60 }, "agingRule": { "enabled": true, "expireWarningSec":
1209600, "graceAuthNLimit": 3, "maxAgeSec": 0, "minAgeSec": 0 }, "characterRule": {
"enabled": true, "minDigit": 1, "minLowercasechars": 1, "minSpecialchars": 0,
"minUppercasechars": 1 }, "description": "string", "historyRule": { "enabled": true,
"passwdhistorycount": 10, "passwdhistorydurationMonth": 60 }, "lengthRule": { "enabled":
true, "maxLength": 16, "minLength": 8 }, "name": "ppolicy_default" }'
https://<MSX_URL>/idm/api/v1/pwdpolicy/ppolicy_default
Your client application requests an access token from the MSX authorization server, extracts a token from the response, and sends the token to the MSX API that you want to access.

About this Content

This section provides information about related documentation of Cisco MSX and trademarks used in this content.

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