First Published: August 30, 2024

Last Updated: August 30, 2024

This document provides information about Cisco Crosswork Planning 7.0, including product overview, features and functionality, and known issues and limitations.

Overview

Cisco Crosswork Planning provides tools to create and maintain a model of the current network through the continual monitoring and analysis of the network, and the traffic demands that are placed on it. At a given time, this network model contains all relevant information about a network, including topology, configuration, and traffic information. You can use this information as a basis for analyzing the impact on the network due to changes in traffic demands, paths, node and link failures, network optimizations, or other changes.

Cisco Crosswork Planning includes design and planning tools that help network engineers and operators predict growth in their network, simulate failures, and optimize design to meet performance objectives while minimizing cost.

Key Features

This section describes the primary features and functionalities of Cisco Crosswork Planning.

Table 1. Key Features

Feature

Description

Automated collection and model building

The Cisco Crosswork Planning Collector application automates the discovery of multi vendor, multi protocol network devices, topology, and traffic statistics. For details, see the Cisco Crosswork Planning 7.0 Collection Setup and Administration document.

Network visualization

The Cisco Crosswork Planning Design application provides a graphical network topology view for the IP layer. This includes nodes, interfaces, circuits, SR/RSVP LSP paths, an so on. For details, see the "Visualize Network Models" chapter in the Cisco Crosswork Planning Design 7.0 User Guide.

AI powered predictive analysis

The Simulation analysis tool enables you to estimate the impact of network changes or potential failures using advanced what-if scenarios. For details, see the "Evaluate Impact of Worst-Case Failures" chapter in the Cisco Crosswork Planning Design 7.0 User Guide.

Forecast traffic growth

The Create growth plans tool offers insights into traffic patterns and growth, helping you to plan and scale your network resources efficiently to meet future demands. For details, see the "Evaluate Impact of Traffic Growth" chapter in the Cisco Crosswork Planning Design 7.0 User Guide.

Demand deduction

The Demand deduction tool helps to derive accurate end-to-end traffic flows from various sources for better capacity planning. For details, see the "Estimate Demand Traffic Using Demand Deduction" section in the Cisco Crosswork Planning Design 7.0 User Guide.

Proactive capacity planning

The Capacity planning optimization tool helps to minimize the addition of any required capacity to be installed on the network. For details, see the "Perform Capacity Planning" chapter in the Cisco Crosswork Planning Design 7.0 User Guide.

Traffic engineering and optimization

The various traffic engineering optimization tools in Cisco Crosswork Planning help to optimize the network design for efficiency and reliability. For details, see the "Traffic Engineering and Optimization" chapters in the Cisco Crosswork Planning Design 7.0 User Guide.

Scale enhancements

The microservices based architecture allows Cisco Crosswork Planning to scale seamlessly with your network.

Modernized infrastructure/UI

Cisco Crosswork Planning runs on the Cisco Crosswork infrastructure. The product's appearance and user experience match with that of the Cisco Crosswork Network Automation suite of products.

The above features collectively contribute to

  • minimizing operational costs

  • optimizing network performance

  • improving agility

  • predicting future traffic needs, and

  • simplifying capacity planning.

Supported Versions

The following tables list the software versions that have been tested and are known to be compatible with Cisco Crosswork Planning.

Table 2. Supported Versions

Software

Supported Version

Cisco Operating System

Cisco IOS XR: 7.7.2, 7.11.2, 24.1.2, 24.2.1

Hypervisor and vCenter

  • VMware vCenter Server 8.0 (U2c or later) and ESXi 8.0 (U2b or later)

  • VMware vCenter Server 7.0 (U3p or later) and ESXi 7.0 (U3p or later)

Browsers

  • Google Chrome—127 or later

  • Mozilla Firefox—128 or later

Product Documentation

An Information Portal is available for Cisco Crosswork Planning. Information is categorized per functional area, making it easy to find and easy to access.

You can also access the most current Cisco Crosswork Planning documentation, including these release notes, online at https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/routers/crosswork-planning-7/model.html

The following documents are provided for Cisco Crosswork Planning 7.0.

Table 3. Cisco Crosswork Planning 7.0 Documentation

Document

What is included

Cisco Crosswork Planning 7.0 Release Notes

This document

Cisco Crosswork Planning 7.0 Installation Guide

  • System requirements

  • Installation instructions

  • Migrate configurations

Cisco Crosswork Planning 7.0 Collection Setup and Administration

Using Cisco Crosswork Planning Collector application to:

  • Configure collections

  • Configure network models

  • Configure various collectors for discovery and collection

  • Install licenses

  • Manage administrative tasks

Cisco Crosswork Planning Design 7.0 User Guide

Using Cisco Crosswork Planning Design application to:

  • Visualize your network

  • Model, simulate, and analyze failures, design changes, and impact of traffic growth

  • Optimize your network for maximum efficiency

  • Generate reports that compare traffic

Open Source Used in Cisco Crosswork Planning 7.0

List of licenses and notices for open source software used in Cisco Crosswork Planning 7.0.

Bugs

Open Bugs

The following table lists the open bugs in Cisco Crosswork Planning 7.0 release:

Table 4. Open Bugs

Bug ID

Description

CSCwk69054

BGP session is not coming up in NetFlow agent when BGP configured with password

CSCwk83659

External collector collection configuration should allow to enable/disable

CSCwm39713

Demand traffic edit/display has issues when the demand name is not unique

Using the Cisco Bug Search Tool

You can use the Cisco Bug Search Tool to search for a specific bug or to search for all bugs in a release.

Procedure

Step 1

Go to the http://tools.cisco.com/bugsearch.

Step 2

Enter your registered Cisco.com username and password, and click Log In.

The Bug Search page opens.

Note

 
If you do not have a Cisco.com username and password, you can register here.

Step 3

Use any of these options to search for bugs, and then click Search to initiate the search:

  • To search for a specific bug, enter the bug ID in the Search For field.

  • To search for bugs based on specific criteria, enter search criteria, such as a problem description, a feature, or a product name, in the Search For field.

  • To search for all Cisco Crosswork Planning bugs: select Series/Model. Then, click the Select from List link.

    1. In the Product drop-down list, select Series/Model.

    2. Click the Select from List link.

    3. On the next page:

      • Enter Cisco Crosswork Planning in the Select Products field.

        OR

      • In the Products list, select Routers > Service Provider Infrastructure Software > Cisco Crosswork Planning > Cisco Crosswork Planning 7.

  • To search for bugs based on releases, in the Release list, select whether to search for bugs affecting a specific release, bugs that were fixed in a specific release, or both. Then, enter one or more release numbers in the text field.

Step 4

When the search results are displayed, use the filter tools to narrow the results. You can filter the bugs by status, severity, and so on.

Note

 
To export the results to a spreadsheet, click Export Results to Excel.

Known Issues and Limitations

This section describes the known issues and limitations in Cisco Crosswork Planning 7.0.

Cisco Crosswork Planning Collector

  • From the Cisco Crosswork Planning Collector application, you can download plan file only in the .db format. You do not have the option to download it in the .txt format.

  • You can configure the archiving or aggregation of plan files only by running a collection. It is not possible to set up archive or aggregation of plan files independently.

  • When a large number of collectors are included in a configuration, the chart content displayed on the Preview page becomes difficult to read.

Cisco Crosswork Planning Design

  • Some CLI tools have the option to select specific tables (for example, <Nodes> table, <Interfaces> table, and so on). In Cisco Crosswork Planning 7.0, you cannot use this option because there is no option to export these tables from the Network Summary tables.

  • When you select the objects in a network plot, they are highlighted in the Network Summary table. However, there is no option to filter the table to display only these selected objects.

  • There is no way to easily distinguish between Inter-AS and Intra-AS links in the network plot, as both are displayed similarly.

  • Cisco Crosswork Planning does not have a report log page which can assist in identifying basic errors.

Design Engines

  • It is not possible to define the CPU and memory resource allocation for design engine instances during installation.

Alarms and Events

  • The alarms and events associated with the Cisco Crosswork Planning applications are not supported in Cisco Crosswork Planning 7.0.

Security

Cisco takes great strides to ensure that all our products conform to the latest industry recommendations. We firmly believe that security is an end-to-end commitment and are here to help secure your entire environment. Please work with your Cisco account team to review the security profile of your network.

For details on how we validate our products, see Cisco Secure Products and Solutions and Cisco Security Advisories.

If you have questions or concerns regarding the security of any Cisco products, please open a case with the Cisco Customer Experience team and include details about the tool being used and any vulnerabilities it reports.

Support and Downloads

The Cisco Support and Downloads website provides online resources to download documentation, software, and tools. Use these resources to install and configure the software and to troubleshoot and resolve technical issues with Cisco products and technologies.

Access to most tools on the Cisco Support and Downloads website requires a Cisco.com user ID and password.

For more information, visit:

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/index.html

Communications, Services, and Additional Information

  • To receive timely, relevant information from Cisco, sign up at Cisco Profile Manager.

  • To get the business impact you’re looking for with the technologies that matter, visit Cisco Services.

  • To submit a service request, visit Cisco Support.

  • To discover and browse secure, validated enterprise-class apps, products, solutions and services, visit Cisco DevNet.

  • To obtain general networking, training, and certification titles, visit Cisco Press.

  • To find warranty information for a specific product or product family, access Cisco Warranty Finder.

Cisco Bug Search Tool

Cisco Bug Search Tool (BST) is a web-based tool that acts as a gateway to the Cisco bug tracking system that maintains a comprehensive list of defects and vulnerabilities in Cisco products and software. BST provides you with detailed defect information about your products and software.