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Cisco Crosswork Network Controller 2.0 and Data Gateway 2.0 Collection v1

July 2021

Cisco Crosswork Network Controller (CNC) allows customers to deploy services faster and enables intent-based network optimization that mitigates network congestion issues. CNC has been shaped by the experience of helping multiple tier-one service provider and large enterprise customers automate everything from simple device turn-up to sophisticated full lifecycle service management. CNC combines intent-based network automation to deliver critical capabilities for service orchestration and fulfillment, network optimization, service path computation, device deployment and management, and fault remediation.

CNC offers service providers a turnkey network automation solution that delivers increased service agility, cost efficiency, and optimization for faster time to customer value, improved end-user service experience, and lower operating cost.

CNC is a micro-services-based platform. The data collection functionality has been separated out into its own VM and into its own software package called Cisco Crosswork Data Gateway. Cisco Crosswork Data Gateway gathers all the information from the monitored devices and forwards it to Crosswork for analysis and processing. Crosswork Data Gateway can also be used to send collected data to external customer-managed messaging buses such as Kafka or gRPC servers.

Cisco Crosswork Data Gateway offloads voluminous data collection closer to the devices while allowing target applications to scale independently. It enables service providers to quickly program and deploy collectors and offers central visibility into services collecting data and the type of data being collected.

The solution also uses Cisco Network Service Orchestrator (NSO) to deploy configuration changes or create new services.

The objective of this demo is to practice with new and existing features introduced in Crosswork Data Gateway 2.0. The use case here will be using Crosswork Data Gateway to collect data from the network and send the data to an external (customer managed) Kafka server rather than feeding one of the Crosswork applications (Health Insights). In previous 1.1.x releases, to achieve this objective, it was only possible to rely on the API to create collection jobs. This lab will perform the same exercise and will also use new features introduced in Crosswork Data Gateway 2.0 to achieve the same objective using the Crosswork UI.

Students will use the Crosswork Network Controller API and JSON payloads to create collection jobs on the Crosswork Data Gateway. Students will also learn the Crosswork Data Gateway protobuf message structure.

Scenarios

  • Scenario 1.      Verify Setup
  • Scenario 2.      Create Collection Jobs using CDG Demo Portal
  • Scenario 3.      Create Collection Jobs using Postman
  • Scenario 4.      Create Collection Jobs for External Destination using Crosswork UI
  • Scenario 5.      Add an External Destination to a Health Insight KPI Profile

Resources