Cisco Smart Care Service

Transcription

1 Cisco Smart Care Service Q. What is the typical length of time it takes to deploy Cisco Smart Care Service internally at the partner s site and onsite at the customer s site? A. To register and set up the network appliance takes about 20 minutes. To create the customer and run discovery and Inventory can take between 20 minutes to an hour depending on the size of the network. After that, service run times will vary depending upon network configurations. Q. Say the partner has three different customers and each customer has 400 users. Will the partner s single network appliance be able to manage all 1200 users? A. Each customer needs to have its own client, hardware or software. The number of users is a guideline. The only limiting factor is the number of qualified devices in their entire network (5 to 105, excluding IP phones). Each customer is handled separately, and each customer has a Cisco Smart Care network appliance or network client installed in their network. So, if you have three different customers, each customer needs to have its own network appliance or network client. Q. What is the weight variable used to qualify customer networks? A. Weight is a method of giving network devices a value depending on the complexity of the product. Weight is used for contract quoting. Q. Will older Cisco devices be supported: for example, a Cisco 2503 Router? A. It depends on the device. When an end of support notice is issued, affected devices will no longer be covered. Talk to your partner about replacement strategies. Q. What happens if I add a device to a Cisco Smart Care Service contract, and support for this device is terminated a month later? A. Your partner will advise you on responding to the end of support status of your affected device. The Cisco administrator can advise on cost adjustments for devices no longer supported. Q. How does Cisco Unified Communications Manager work in Cisco Smart Care? A. Cisco Unified Communications Manager is software and is not counted as a device in Cisco Smart Care. However, the Media Convergence Server (MCS) used to deploy Cisco Unified Communications Manager is counted as one device (a non-mcs server or third-party server is not counted). Q. Because Cisco Unified Communications Manager is based on a number of servers, some of them for backup, how is the device counted in pricing? A. MCS servers will be counted as devices, as will backup servers. This is so that if there is a problem with the primary or secondary server, they will be covered under the network-level coverage. All contents are Copyright Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 1 of 10

2 Q. What are the eligibility and minimum requirement for partners to qualify for Cisco Smart Care? A. At the moment, the minimum requirement is for the partner to be a Cisco Certified Select-level partner. Voice and security assessment will need additional specialization qualification. In the future, the partner will also need to undertake training and assessment. This is a free test provided by Cisco. Online testing will take less than an hour. Q. If the customer opts for a yearly subscription model, how will quarterly true-ups affect them? A. At quarterly true-ups, an extra invoice will be sent if there are additional devices added that move the device count to the next level. If you add a device but do not go over the device count in your band, there will be no additional bill. Q. Is Unified Communications Software Subscription (UCSS) covered by Cisco Smart Care? A. Only essential services are covered by Cisco Smart Care. UCSS is not covered. Q. Why can a user not register when an account has been created for that user A. Make sure the first name, country, ID, and access-level fields are not empty. If any of these fields is empty, registration will fail for this user. Q. How do Cisco Smart Care and Cisco protect data gathered and transmitted? A. End user network information is sent to Cisco with an industry-standard encrypted channel using HTTPS. After it is received by Cisco, the information either is protected by Cisco in accordance with its obligations under the terms of the confidential information provision between Cisco and Cisco Smart Care users or is proactively purged. Q. What is the monitoring tool? A. The monitoring tool, or as Cisco Smart Care calls it, the network appliance/network client, is a hardware appliance or software client that enables Cisco to proactively collect and analyze data in an end user s network and securely provide such information to the Cisco passwordprotected Web portal. Data Q. What data is gathered over the network by Cisco Smart Care? A. End user network information that is collected, stored, and analyzed in connection with the network appliance/network client includes the following: configurations (including running configurations and startup configurations), product identification numbers, serial numbers, host names, equipment locations, IP addresses, system contacts, equipment models, feature sets, software versions, hardware versions, installed memory, installed flash, boot versions, chassis series, exceptions to such information (for example, duplicate host name, duplicate IP address, devices running an interim release image), slot IDs, card types, card families, firmware versions, and other network and inventory information as deemed appropriate by Cisco. See the next question for more information. Q. What information is stored on the network appliance/network client and does not go to Cisco? A. Information such as logins, passwords, and configuration files is stored only on the network appliance or network client and is not transmitted to Cisco. All contents are Copyright Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 2 of 10

3 Q. How do I get confirmation on what you are sending to Cisco? A. You do not get confirmations from the Cisco Smart Care Service. However, if you want to see what is going on, you can log onto the network appliance and enable traces (> trace enable) and then run an inventory. You will be able to see in the traces what commands are being run and what variables are being sent to Cisco. Go into > trace view and then select the day and device you want to see. Within the trace you can see the commands run and then, at the end, which variables are being filled. Be aware that turning on a trace consumes some overhead and can affect performance. It is recommended that the trace function be disabled after the evaluation is completed. Application Q. Are device serial numbers visible from the portal? A. Serial numbers are listed in the inventory report. The serial number is derived from the electronic information we can get from the device. This derived serial number typically matches the serial number that is physically on the device. Older models such as Cisco 2500 Series Routers, Cisco 2600 Series Multiservice Platforms, and so on will have a different electronic serial number from what is physically on the device. Q. How do I fix an appliance boot failure when the console is connected to a telnet port that is not active? It fails with a prompt grub>. A. Either power-cycle the appliance while connected to the terminal server line or unplug the serial cable, power-cycle, wait for 30 seconds, and reconnect the cable. Alternatively, use a PC for the console session. Q. Why does hardware registration fail? A. Use a static IP assigned using the conf ip command (as above). Reboot using the reload command. When you use the register command, make sure the partner Cisco.com ID is set up as partner admin or partner user at the partner portal. Also no spaces are allowed in the client name or the site name. The Website tools.cisco.com must be reachable by port 443 (normal HTTPS port) from the appliance. Q. The partner (Cisco.com) login ID does not work in client registration. A. Cisco.com IDs cannot have any special characters. The login ID length must be between 7 and 17 characters: this is a Cisco.com requirement. Q. Do I have to add a customer before installing the client? A. Adding a customer with a unique login name is recommended but is optional. When registering the software or the hardware client, you can specify the customer login name (same as customer s Cisco.com ID), and it will automatically associate the customer with the client and add the site. This avoids a few extra steps. Q. Why does nothing happen when I click a button or I do not see a button? Examples: Assigning a device to a customer: I click, and nothing happens, or when unassigning the appliance there is a Close button instead of OK, Cancel. A. IE 6 is the only browser currently supported and recommended. For the application to work, turn off any pop-up blockers, including any Yahoo! or Google toolbars. Q. Why are services grayed out for a customer? A. The network appliance must be assigned and enabled, and a valid contract must be in place. All contents are Copyright Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 3 of 10

4 Q. How do I assign and enable a client? A. After a client is successfully registered, it will show up under Administrator in the partner s dashboard. Add a site to the customer by clicking the Add Site button, choosing the customer, and entering a site name like city name or location. Then click the Assign/Unassign button to assign the client to the customer. After you are done, it will show the status as Assigned. Click View on the far right and choose Enable and click Save. Q. I do not see the Administrator menu on the left navigation bar in order to add customers or request tokens or assign clients. How can I authorize other partner users (like a network engineer) to access administrator in menu? A. The partner administrator is the person who registered. The workaround is to register another partner so that the person registering becomes a partner admin. However, there is a limitation that you cannot delete a partner user permanently. So, you will have to request that the user be deleted through support. Q. What s the user ID/password for the network appliance? What is the enable password? A. The default user ID is cisco and password is cisco. The enable password is admin. You can (and should) change this access information. Q. Do I need a customer login before installing at customer site? A. Recommended but not required. Q. Should I add customer information in the dashboard before installing the client? A. Adding a customer with a unique login name is recommended but is optional. When registering the software or the hardware client, you can specify the customer login name (same as customer s Cisco.com ID), and it will automatically associate the customer with the client and add the site. This avoids a few extra steps. The customer login name field in the partner dashboard is matched against the customer login name entered in the software or hardware client during registration. If an exact match is found, the client is assigned, and a site is created for the customer. Q. What is the correct response to Client re-installation failed error message : Failed to complete installation on Windows when installing software client (CNAC)? A. This is a bug with Install Shield. The solution is the following: 1. Go into task manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del) and kill any msiexec.exe processes. 2. Clean the Windows temp directories. (e.g. c:\windows\temp). 3. Reboot. 4. Restart the installation. Q. Can a partner register the appliance in their lab and move the appliance to customer network? A. Yes. But the hardware client needs a new IP address based on the customer s network (conf ip command) and a reboot (reload command). All contents are Copyright Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 4 of 10

5 Q. Why do I get an error message saying cannot update client tables registration files? A. This is a known issue. Assign a static IP and reboot the appliance. Q. How do I assign and enable a client? A. After a client is successfully registered, it will show up under Administration in the partner s dashboard. Add a site to the customer by clicking the Add Site button, choosing the customer, and entering a site name such as city name or location. Then click the Assign/Unassign button to assign the client to the customer. When finished, it will show the status as Assigned. Click View on the far right and choose Enable and click Save. Q. What should I do when the appliance status displays Appliance Status: Operation queued in server for remote client processing and then it just stays in that state and does not complete? Eventually I get a Timeout: Client Failed to respond message. A. Make sure you can ping your devices. Please check the network if the device is reachable by CLI (telnet/secure Shell [SSH] Protocol) or HTTP/HTTPS (in case of the application). If the device is reachable, then escalate this problem to support (your partner or Cisco). Q. What s difference between customer site and location? A. Site is where the appliance installed. Locations are addresses where the devices are located. In the device inventory, the locations can be viewed and updated.. Q. Why am I having problems printing reports? A. Cisco Smart Care printing of reports is limited. It is a known problem that portrait mode cuts off part of the report. As a workaround, print in landscape mode. Q. What do the services do in the network? A. Go to the partner portal. Review the Cisco Smart Care Partner User Guide. Q. How do I delete my customer information from Cisco? A. See the section Customer Administration>Users>Deleting Users in the Cisco Smart Care Partner User Guide at the partner portal. In short, to erase customer network data on the appliance and in the portal, use the unregister command on the Cisco Smart Care appliance. The unregister command removes the association between the Cisco Smart Care appliance and the user. Then manually delete the customer from Cisco Smart Care. Q. What happens when I delete a customer from the Cisco Smart Care control panel? A. When a partner deletes a customer, sensitive information such as username, password, community string, and so on is deleted from the Cisco Smart Care client. After a customer is deleted, the customer data is no longer accessible to any user (partner as well as Cisco Smart Care admin) from the Cisco Smart Care Service control panel. The customer data is soft deleted (not hard deleted). Soft delete means the data is not physically deleted, but certain attributes are changed (for example, status is changed to inactive) so that the data will not be available to users (including the Cisco Smart Care administrator) from the application. Authorized users such as database administrators can access the data in the database. Hard delete means the data is physically deleted/purged and will not be accessible to anyone, including database administrators. All contents are Copyright Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 5 of 10

6 Specifically, soft deleted information includes customer information (name, address, contact details), customer contract information (contract number, type, status, effective dates), customer user information, product and pricing information for customer quotes, network name, IP address, subnet mask, default gateway, serial number, model name, series name, hardware version, manufacturer, firmware version, software version, assembly number, and assembly revision. Specifically, hard deleted information includes device-specific information and username and encrypted password to log into the device (these never leave the customer network). The following customer information is accessible in other systems even after soft deleting the customer in Cisco Smart Care: customer quotes in Encover (quoting database), customer quotes and contract details in CIBER (contract database), customer information in CAAS (Cisco.com access), and customer information in ERP (ordering tool). Q. How often does the appliance/client ping Cisco? A. The appliance/client pings Cisco every 10 seconds when there is activity and every 30 seconds when there is no activity. Q. What are the duties of the partner administrators in comparison to the partner users? A. The difference between the two is that the partner user can do the same as the partner administrator, except the administrator can also control partner access and changing partner details. Q. Are there different user privileges for client networks? A. There are different partner users. The administrator has full privileges within the Cisco Smart Care control panel, and the user has limited abilities and does not see the administration links. Q. How and where are passwords stored? A. The username and passwords that you provide are stored in the network appliance and are encrypted in 32-bit custom encryption. The username, passwords, and Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) community strings are stored only in the appliance database and are also encrypted. This information is not stored in Cisco (that is, the Cisco Smart Care server). They will be used to run services that you initiate. Q. What are the services provided in security assess and repair? A. Please review the details in the Cisco Smart Care Partner User Guide in the section called Operating the Cisco Smart Care Application>Customer Relations>Smart Care Services. Q. What is the difference between assess and repair and assess and prepare for voice? A. Please review the details in the Cisco Smart Care Partner User Guide in the section called Operating the Cisco Smart Care Application>Customer Relations>Smart Care Services. Q. What are some of the services provided in voice assess and repair? A. Please review the details in the Cisco Smart Care Partner User Guide in the section called Operating the Cisco Smart Care Application>Customer Relations>Smart Care Services. Q. What happens in the syslog service? What prerequisites are needed? A. Please review the details in the Cisco Smart Care Partner User Guide in the section called Operating the Cisco Smart Care Application>Customer Relations>Smart Care Services. All contents are Copyright Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 6 of 10

7 Q. What is the availability service, and when will the device have less than 100 percent availability? A. The availability service is calculated from uptime. If the device has never failed from initial installation, the availability will be 100 percent. Q. What version of Transport Layer Security (TLS) is used? A. Cisco Smart Care uses TLS/Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) version 3. Discovery and Inventory Q. Why does inventory not identify devices? A. SNMP should be enabled on the network. Read only would be preferred because read-write opens more security issues. For security purposes, if you are enabling SNMP, you should set the community string to something other than public (which would then need to be specified during discovery). Also, any intrusion prevention system (IPS) or intrusion detection system (IDS) systems in place will get alerts from the discovery action. Q. Why do discovery and inventory takes so long? A. Try a smaller subnet or a known range of IP addresses first. If it times out, check the client status from the dashboard: Customers - Customer Name > Administration > Assessment Appliance Configuration > View > client name hyper link > Refresh button. Q. Why do I get a There are no inventory run devices/devices that support the service message? A. Check the list of supported devices and services supported for the device. Q. What information is gathered during the discovery phase and inventory phase? A. The following information is gathered: IP address Device name Configuration info Product ID Serial number Card Q. What protocols are used during discovery and inventory (D&I)? A. Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) and SNMP are used during discovery. Inventory uses telnet, SSH, SNMP, and HTTP/HTTPS. Q. What ports are used for each protocol? A. ICMP uses port 8; SNMP uses User Datagram Protocol (UDP) port 161, telnet port 23, SSH port 22, HTTP port 80, and HTTPS port 443. Q. What versions of SNMP does the client utilize? A. SNMP 1 and SNMP 2. Q. How many times does the appliance ping a device during a discovery? A. The right answer is it depends. In the current engine, the device is pinged twice as long as a reply is received from the device; otherwise, the client will ping the twice two more times. So, a total of two ping requests if the device is alive; if a device is not alive, it will be pinged four times. All contents are Copyright Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 7 of 10

8 Q. Is the timeout configurable? A. No. Q. What MIB objects are gathered during discovery? A. Again, the right answer here is it depends. All routers, switches, and other network devices are queried for sysobjectid only. Windows servers (with SNMP enabled) are queried for enterprise MIBs. The sysobjectid is short for system object identifier and is an industry standard SNMP data element that network equipment manufacturers support when providing SNMP in operating systems. The sysobjectid includes a unique Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) enterprise number value assigned to each network equipment manufacturer. The manufacturer assigns the unique hardware model value to each product it manufactures. Cisco s IANA enterprise number is 9. Q. Is Cisco Smart Care capable of importing IP address information from a spreadsheet or other network management workstations? A. This is supported and can be added. Talk to your partner or Cisco Smart Care administrator. Q. For Cisco devices that are not in the supported device list, what kind of information is collected? A. sysobjectid for profiling. Q. What information is available on products not from Cisco? A. sysobjectid for profiling. Q. Why do I get a There are no inventory run devices/devices that support the service message? A. Check the list of supported devices and services supported for the device in the partner dashboard under support. The inventory service for the devices must be completed before running any other services. Q. What is discovery doing in the network? A. Discovery uses ICMP and SNMP to determine if there is an entity at the IP addresses specified. Q. What is inventory doing in the network? A. The process varies depending on the device type, but during inventory, the following commands are typically being run on the routers and switches: show version show system show module show inventory Show diag show flash show bootflash Q. How are phones discovered? How are they getting classified as the appropriate phone type? A. The IP addresses of the phones are discovered during the discovery operation. Since SNMP is not supported by phones, phone type will not be identified. A user has to select device type (phone type) while adding to the inventory. Once it is added to the inventory, phones will be All contents are Copyright Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 8 of 10

9 available for inventory operation. The following information is collected from phones using HTTP during inventory: Host name App load ID (as OS release) Version Hardware revision Serial number (as processor board ID) Model number (as PID) MAC address Interface info Q. Does Cisco Smart Care capture any network traffic (actual data) for any of the reports? A. No, Cisco Smart Care does not read packet contents. It only cares about traffic to calculate percent utilization for LAN/WAN analysis. Hardware and Software Client Q. What is the link that forms between the appliance and Cisco? A. The link between the appliance and Cisco is a secure HTTPS connection. Q. What is the difference between a hardware and software client? Why would you use one over the other? A. Basically, the hardware and the software have the same functionalities. However, Cisco recommends the hardware version for the following reasons: SSH support on hardware Issue with software version s computer/server s compatibility with Linux OS Replacement is easier with hardware Dedicated device Q. How much bandwidth is Cisco Smart Care using when it is not running a service? A. Traffic between client and server will be minimal for an average-sized network and under normal operation conditions. Below are typical figures for client polling the server. Duration of 20 minutes no major activity: Avg. packets/sec Avg. packet size 204 bytes Total bytes Avg. bytes/sec 289 Avg. MBit/sec Note: Minimum bandwidth used is 289 bytes/sec (~0.3 Kbytes/sec). All contents are Copyright Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 9 of 10

10 The following are the figures for running a D & I for a medium network with a one subnet having more than 130 discovered devices and more than 70 inventoried devices. Duration of 28 minutes with D & I service running: Avg. packets/sec Avg. packet size 346 bytes Total bytes Avg. bytes/sec Avg. MBit/sec Note: Approximate max bandwidth used is 1500 bytes/sec (~1.5 KBytes/sec). Recommended bandwidth required along with other small and medium-sized business (SMB) traffic is 256Kbps. Q. What about redundancy for the appliance? A. The appliance has a backup capability, so that should it fail, you can restore the information and appliance to its previous state. See the Cisco Smart Care Partner User Guide for more information. Also, partners should back up appliances from time to time manually. Q. How does the appliance integrate with third-party Network Management Systems (NMS)? A. At this time, the appliance does not integrate with NMS products. However, it is being investigated. Q. Where do you place the appliance in the customer s network? A. The hardware appliance should be placed somewhere in the customer s network where it can access (ping, SNMP, telnet, HTTP. HTTPS, and so on) all the network devices in the network. As for physical location, a rack mount is provided so it can be rack-mounted with the other Cisco equipment. Printed in USA C /07 All contents are Copyright Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 10 of 10