License Tiers

This article describes the new Crosswork Assurance licensing tiers introduced now that we're part of Cisco. Customers may still hold licenses in our former tier structure, and we will work with you to migrate them to these new entitlement tiers.

Crosswork Assurance Licensing Tiers

Cisco Crosswork Assurance has two offerings to align with customer use cases:

1. Crosswork Assurance Essentials is available to Cisco Crosswork Network Controller (CNC) customers only, offering a limited set of capabilities that are targeted to automate assurance integration with the Crosswork Network Controller platform.

2. Crosswork Assurance Advantage is our full solution with all network and application performance monitoring capabilities.

Summary of Crosswork Assurance Essentials Functionality

Crosswork Assurance Essentials enables the following capabilities, and is available only to customers who have purchased Cisco Crosswork Network Controller Advantage and Service Health:

• CNC version 6.x - Continuous network assurance for Layer 3 leveraging Sensor Agents running Two-Way Active Measurement Protocol (TWAMP)
• CNC version 7.x - Continuous network assurance for Layer 3 leveraging Sensor Agents and/or Sensor Control running TWAMP

Crosswork Assurance functionalities included:

• Sensor and Session Management through the included RESTCONF interface
• Data Streaming through the included gNMI interface

Summary of Crosswork Assurance Advantage Functionality

Sensor Agents Advantage offers the full value and power of the platform:

• Visibility – Ultra-granular network performance data
• Insights – Analytics for monitoring, troubleshooting, and trend analysis

Crosswork Assurance Advantage offers a variety of assurance and monitoring capabilities:

• Continuous Network Assurance for Layer 2 or Layer 3 networks
• Continuous Application Performance Assurance leveraging Sensor Capture
• Monitoring Model Driven Telemetry (MDT) performance metrics on Cisco IOS® XR devices
• Monitoring Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) network performance metrics on third-party devices
• Service Activation Tests (can be achieved through hardware or software sensors)
• Continuous protocol testing to monitor endpoint responsiveness

Additional Advantage capabilities are available if hardware sensors are added to the customer solution. Crosswork Assurance hardware sensors are sold separately.

Sessions require software licenses.
Each Session from telemetry sources requires one Advantage Telemetry Software License, while each Session from Assurance Sensors requires one Test Sessions Software License. For more information, see Licensing in the Cisco Crosswork Assurance Sensors Data Sheet.

Advantage includes all Essentials functionality, as well as Cisco Crosswork Assurance that provides:

• Retention of historical performance data
• Generation of threshold alerts
• Custom dashboards
• Refined troubleshooting and deep analysis tools
• Scheduled reports

Test Session Types

License Utilization Monitoring

Crosswork Assurance licenses are consumed as Test Sessions, Telemetry sessions, and User Experience capacity. This section explains how that consumption is measured, aggregated, and reported, both for SaaS tenants and for on-premises deployments, so you can understand where the numbers on your license utilization report come from.

How utilization is measured

Regardless of deployment model, Crosswork Assurance measures license consumption the same way:

1. Every session the platform runs is tagged with a session type — for example a Test Session type like TWAMP, or a telemetry session source.
2. On an hourly cadence, the platform queries its datastore for each session type and determines the maximum number of unique sessions of that type that were active at any point during the hour.
3. That produces one number per session type, per hour — a peak concurrent-session count, not a cumulative or total count.

This hourly, per-type peak is the unit of consumption that gets grouped into the license categories on your order (Test Sessions, Telemetry, User Experience).

There are a few test session types that are not mapped one to one with Advantage licensing (for example SOAM/Y.1731). See the Test Session Types table above for the license ratio for each session type.

SaaS deployments

In SaaS, all of the tenants running on a given deployment share a single local datastore for that deployment. The hourly peak-concurrency numbers for every tenant on that deployment are computed and stored in that one shared local datastore — there is no per-tenant datastore. A centralized monitoring platform scrapes each deployment's local datastore on a regular cadence to pull the hourly per-tenant, per-session-type numbers up to a central location. From there:

1. A downstream aggregation layer reads the hourly per-tenant, per-session-type data that was scraped out of each deployment's local datastore.
2. Sessions are grouped by license category:
   • All Test Sessions are summed to produce Advantage Test Session utilization.
   • All telemetry sessions (and any other untracked/unknown session types) are summed to produce Telemetry Session utilization.
3. The aggregated, per-tenant utilization is exported into Cisco's internal sales tools for license tracking and reporting.

On-premises deployments

On-premises deployments use the same hourly peak-concurrency measurement at the datastore level. Results are stored locally and are viewable through the Platform Administration interface, under Resource > Grafana Dashboards, and are also exportable using the Grafana dashboard export tools.

Placeholder: The centralized data collection, grouping, and reporting pipeline for on-prem is being finalized. This section will be updated with the specifics of how on-prem utilization data is shipped to the centralized monitoring platform.

Advantage Test Session utilization

Advantage Test Session utilization is the hourly peak concurrency of all active-assurance test sessions, summed across session sub-types (TWAMP, Y.1731, etc. — see the Test Session Types table above).

Each sub-type is counted independently for peak concurrency within the hour, and then the sub-type totals are summed together to produce the overall Advantage Test Session number reported against your order's Test Session entitlement.

Telemetry Session utilization

Telemetry Session utilization follows the same model: the hourly peak concurrency of telemetry sessions is measured per tenant, then summed across telemetry sub-types — including any session types that are not individually tracked or categorized — to produce the Telemetry Session number reported against your order's Telemetry entitlement.

User Experience utilization

Placeholder: User Experience (Network Intelligence, Optimization, and Energy Reduction) utilization monitoring is not yet documented here. This section will be filled in once the measurement and reporting approach for UE consumption is finalized.

Data flow: from tenant to license reporting

The diagram below shows how license utilization data moves from individual tenants, across deployments, to the centralized monitoring platform, and ultimately into Cisco's internal sales tools for tracking.

Smart Account / Smart Licensing

While your entitlements are present in Smart Accounts, Crosswork Assurance does not currently report license utilization into Cisco Smart Account or Smart Licensing, which is Cisco's standard mechanism for customers to visualize license consumption. Utilization is reported into Cisco's internal sales tools instead. This is a deliberate, paused decision — Crosswork Assurance customers span multiple buying programs, and not all of them use Smart Licensing, so a Smart Account integration has not yet cleared the priority bar against other work. If your organization requires Smart Licensing visibility for utilization, contact your account team.

Key principles

One consistent measurement across products and deployments

Whether a session is a TWAMP test, a telemetry collection, or any other billable session type, it is counted the same way: hourly peak concurrency, per session type, per tenant. This
keeps the underlying measurement consistent even as it gets grouped differently for reporting.

Grouping happens downstream of measurement

The datastore query that produces the hourly peak-concurrency numbers does not know about license categories — it only knows about session types. Grouping session types into
Advantage Test Sessions and Telemetry Sessions (and eventually User Experience) happens in the aggregation layer, after the raw data has been scraped from the centralized
monitoring platform.

Smart Account / Smart Licensing is not currently integrated

While your entitlements are present in Smart Accounts, Crosswork Assurance does not currently report license utilization into Cisco Smart Accounts, which is Cisco's standard
mechanism for customers to visualize license consumption.

Common misconceptions

"Utilization is a running total of every session ever started"

Utilization is only cumulative within each hour. It is the sum of all unique sessions of a given type observed within each hour.

"Test sessions and telemetry sessions share the same license pool"

They don't. Crosswork Assurance test sessions and telemetry sessions are measured and grouped independently, and are reported against separate entitlements on your order
(SKY-ADV-TEST / SKY-ESS-TEST for Test Sessions, SKY-ADV-TELEM for Telemetry).

"License utilization is visible in Cisco Smart Account today"

It is not, for either SaaS or on-premises deployments. Utilization is reported into Cisco sales tracking tools, not Smart Account/Smart Licensing. See Smart Account / Smart Licensing is not
currently integrated.