Table Of Contents
Introduction to Cisco Smart Call Home
Benefits of Smart Call Home
Smart Call Home Interaction with Call Home
System Requirements for the Call Home Feature
Requirements for Smart Call Home
Transport Gateway Software Package
Quick Start for Smart Call Home
Introduction to Cisco Smart Call Home
This chapter provides an overview of the Cisco Smart Call Home service and covers the following areas:
•
Benefits of Smart Call Home.
•Smart Call Home Interaction with Call Home.
•System Requirements for the Call Home Feature.
•Requirements for Smart Call Home.
•Transport Gateway Software Package.
•Quick Start for Smart Call Home.
Benefits of Smart Call Home
Smart Call Home offers proactive diagnostics and real-time alerts on select Cisco devices and provides higher network availability and increased operational efficiency. Smart Call Home is a new, secure connected service of SMARTnet that is currently available on the following products:
•Catalyst 6500
•Cisco 7600
•Nexus 5000
•Nexus 7000
Smart Call Home offers higher network availability through proactive, fast issue resolution by:
•Identifying issues quickly with continuous monitoring, real-time, proactive alerts, and detailed diagnostics.
•Anticipating some failures before they occur and providing notification to TAC or customer to allow preventative action to be taken.
•Resolving critical problems faster with direct, automatic access to experts at Cisco TAC.
Smart Call Home offers increased operational efficiency by providing customers the ability to:
•Use staff resources more efficiently by reducing troubleshooting time.
•Generate Service Requests to Cisco TAC automatically, routed to the appropriate support team, which provides detailed diagnostic information that speeds problem resolution.
Smart Call Home offers fast, web-based access to needed information that provides customers the ability to:
•Review all Call Home messages, diagnostics, and recommendations in one place.
•Check Service Request status quickly.
•View the most up-to-date inventory and configuration information for all Call Home devices.
Smart Call Home Interaction with Call Home
The Smart Call Home service provides proactive messaging by capturing and processing Call Home diagnostics and inventory alarms. The Call Home feature on the Cisco devices provides the capability for a customer to configure Call Home profiles that define:
•Events of interest.
•Destination of event and system messages.
•Transport method for event and system messages.
Events of interest have customer-defined rules applied from a profile, which specify what action(s) should be taken when different types of events occur. Some examples of how customers can configure a profile could be:
•Allow an individual to be paged at home via short text email when a major diagnostic failure occurs.
•All environmental events might be sent via HTTPS to a network management stations.
•Generate Call Home messages via HTTPS (or email) to Cisco TAC for specific types of events that will generate a service request to TAC; message will proactively send all needed error information to TAC for further analysis.
The Smart Call Home Service, in conjunction with supporting Cisco devices, provides a mechanism for Cisco hardware to send the following information to Cisco TAC.
•Periodic system messages.
•Real time system event messages.
Call Home messages that are sent periodically include inventory and configuration information.
The inventory and configuration messages are used to generate the Device Report and improve hardware and software quality by identifying failure trends.
Call Home messages that are generated by system events include diagnostic and environmental messages:
•Diagnostic messages are generated when GOLD failures occur (see Generic Online Diagnostics on the Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Switch).
•Environmental messages, via EEM, are sent when temperature, power and other types of system related thresholds are crossed resulting in major, minor or recovery alarms.
Note The Diagnostic and Environmental tests run on all Smart Call Home supported product types.
The information in these messages enables TAC to provide timely and proactive service to assist the customer in managing and maintaining their network.
System Requirements for the Call Home Feature
The following items are the system requirements for Call Home feature on the following Cisco supported devices:
•For Smart Call Home support the following devices should be running the specified IOS version or later:
–Catalyst 6500 must be running version 12.3(33)SXH image or later.
Note call-home is supported in both modular and non-modular IOS 12.3(33)SXH images
–Cisco 7600 must be running IOS version 12.2(33)SRC or later.
–NEXUS 5000 must be running NX-OS version 4.0(0) or greater.
–NEXUS 7000 must be running NX-OS version 4.0(0) or greater.
•Refer to the Smart Call Home white paper for the following information on how to use the:
–"call-home send alert-group" commands to generate on-demand CH messages.
–Email Address field being correctly populated when triggering the previous Call Home commands.
•The Cisco devicemust be supported under a valid service contract or active warranty. When the device is not covered by a contract or warranty, the device can be registered for a trial period. The contact person's user profile must have a valid service contract or warranty details to entitle access to service requests.
•The Cisco device must be able to reach the Smart Call Home Cisco backend, which receives the Call-Home messages from the Cisco device, and sends out Smart Call Home email notifications, reports and information.
•Only Internet Explorer (IE) browsers are supported.
Requirements for Smart Call Home
The following items are the requirements that are needed to support Smart Call Home:
•For Catalyst 6500's IOS version 12.2(33) SXH or later.
•For Cisco 7600's IOS version 12.2(33)SRC or later.
•For NEXUS 5000's NX-OS version 4.0(0) or greater.
•For NEXUS 7000's NX-OS version 4.0(0) or greater.
•A CCO ID associated with an appropriate Cisco SMARTnet service contract for your company.
•SMARTnet for the device to be registered.
Transport Gateway Software Package
The Transport Gateway is an optional software package that can be downloaded and installed to enable the Call Home environment to securely send messages to Smart Call Home via the Transport Gateway.
Note The software package must be installed and configured before Call Home messages can be successfully sent to and received by Smart Call Home.
The Transport Gateway code can be downloaded from the following location: http://www.cisco.com/cgi-bin/tablebuild.pl/cisco-transport-gateway
Quick Start for Smart Call Home
There are three key areas that are involved with getting a Smart Call Home system to operate, those areas deal with installing and configuring the following items:
•Smart Call Home service on the Cisco Backend; no configuration or installing is required. You only need to access the Smart Call Home web application at the following https://tools.cisco.com/sch/.
•Optionally, the Transport Gateway needs to be installed and configured when the customer wants a secure method of delivering their Call Home messages to the Cisco Backend.
•Call Home feature on the customer devices that generate periodic system messages and real time system event messages.
The following items identify the high-level steps used to install and configure the various components used for establishing a connection between the Call Home feature and Smart Call Home service on the Cisco Backend:
•The following tasks represent the key steps required to install, configure and register the Transport Gateway:
–Download the Transport Gateway Package for either a Windows or Solaris platform at the following URL:
http://www.cisco.com/cgi-bin/tablebuild.pl/cisco-transport-gateway;
Note Go to section Network Analysis and Planning and Cisco Transport Gateway.
–Register and Configure the Transport Gateway.
–Launch the Cisco Transport Gateway Application.
–Specify the Proxy Settings.
–Test the Connection Before Registration.
–Register the Transport Gateway.
–Configure the Transport Gateway Mailbox Settings.
•For Call Home perform the following tasks:
–Go to the following URL to get detailed information on how to configure the Call Home feature:
http://lbj.cisco.com/targets/ucdit/cc/td/doc/product/lan/cat6000/sxhdraft/callhome.htm#wp1119754
–You can configure the Call Home feature on a Cisco device using one of the following basic configurations:
•Call Home Configuration - HTTPS
•Call Home Configuration - Email to Smart Call Home
•Call Home Configuration - Email to Transport Gateway and HTTPS to Cisco
–Send the first Call Home message to the Cisco Backend. The application will send a notification about the pending device registration in Smart Call Home for this device, which needs to be confirmed.
•On Smart Call Home web application perform the following tasks:
–Launch Smart Call Home.
–Accept the Legal agreement, which gives you access to the Smart Call Home web application.
–Confirm Device Registration for Devices with "Pending Registration" that sent the Call Home message.
