Differentiated Experience with Cisco Catalyst Center and CX Services

Cisco Catalyst Center is a powerful network controller and management dashboard that simplifies customer IT operations in enterprise and campus networks via valuable insights, time-saving automation, and robust security capabilities. To help customers reduce risk and respond to network changes and challenges even faster and more intelligently, Cisco has integrated advanced insights and analytics capabilities from the Cisco Success Tracks service into the Catalyst Center platform.

These advanced capabilities enable the platform to securely submit customer configurations to Cisco Services to digitally verify if known issues like security advisories, hardware defects, and software bugs are impacting the customer’s assets. Success Tracks, which is part of the CX Cloud platform, is designed to digitally connect customers to expertise, learning, insights, and support via a curated use-case journey.

The new Catalyst Center customer experience enables predictable business outcomes by combining the best Catalyst Center telemetry, orchestration, and automation capabilities with CX expertise, intellectual capital, and analytics. These Catalyst Center capabilities—now available to customers with Smart Net Total Care contracts—can help minimize operational expenses by avoiding unnecessary device upgrades.

This integration provides Catalyst Center customers with:

• A consistent user experience with insights, reports, and alerts based on shared technology components and telemetry—whether workflows start in Catalyst Center or CX Cloud
• Innovation of advanced capabilities using the best of Catalyst Center telemetry, automation, and orchestration combined with CX experience, expertise, and intellectual capital

Advanced features

Insights customized to specific device configurations and inventory include:

• Advanced security advisories—Significantly improve the accuracy of identifying critical and high-impact vulnerabilities, eliminate the need for further validation, avoid unnecessary software upgrades, and improve security posture and operational efficiency with analysis of Cisco Security Advisories against deployed software features.
• Advanced field notices—Improve the accuracy of identifying non-security-related vulnerabilities, eliminate the need for further troubleshooting of known hardware and software issues, and help to remediate operational risks more quickly via analysis of Field Notices against detailed deployed inventory.
• Advanced network bug identifier—Improve the visibility of known issues; and identify problems that can be addressed proactively to prevent incidents, service outages, and support cases with analysis of key bugs curated by the Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC) experts—against deployed software features.
• End-of-life notices—Improve the accuracy of identification of end-of-sales, software maintenance, last day of support dates, and more by eliminating unnecessary business risks and contributing to technology refresh planning with analysis of End-of-Life Policy milestones against deployed inventory.
• Remote support authorization—Accelerate troubleshooting, help reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR), and maximize network availability by securely sharing the latest operational data from Catalyst Center–managed devices with a TAC engineer during an incident via the embedded Cisco RADKit network-wide orchestrator.
• Wireless troubleshooting workflows—Troubleshoot events and solve incidents without needing to escalate to TAC via Catalyst Center workflows developed with TAC expertise.

How to leverage advanced features

Customers can access these advanced features in three ways:

• Campus devices covered by Success Tracks service contracts
• Campus devices covered by Smart Net Total Care service contracts
• Free 90-day trial for customers without the above service contract coverage

These features are available to customers with Catalyst Center version 2.3.7 and newer. You have access to these features for all assets that are covered by any of the above service contracts.

Below are the steps to enable the new CX features in Catalyst Center:

Note: Customers without applicable service contracts can activate the free, 90-day trial by clicking the Start CX Trial button and accepting the Consent to Connect (as shown below). Note that Start CX Trial will not appear as an option for customers with the service contract coverage listed above.

1. Navigate to the Catalyst Center home page, scroll down to the lower left area (as shown below), and select Authorize Consent to Connect to CX Cloud.
   
2. After selecting Authorize Consent to Connect, check the box that appears to confirm that you read and agree to the conditions, then click the Authorize button (as shown below).
   
3. On the Catalyst Center home page, click on System from the left-hand dropdown and then select Settings (as shown below).
   
4. On the Setting window, select the Machine Reasoning Engine tab and ensure that Auto Update, CX Cloud Service, and Recurring Scan are all enabled (as shown below).
   

contact your Account team.

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