Introduction

Business Critical Services (BCS) has long been a premium service where customers are presented network Operational Insights (OI) by a Network Consulting Engineer (NCE), or via a portal. Our customers have told us they want an alternative consumption model, one that integrates into their own workflow.

The BCS OI API enables customers to prioritize and sequence actionable data-driven Cisco recommendations into decisions and actions to improve network availability, performance, risk mitigation and other network optimization priorities. The BCS OI API allow our customers to programmatically consume the OI in their environment and integrate them into their own systems and automation workflows (eg: ServiceNow, Splunk, etc.).

All BCS 3.0 customers will be able to consume the API.

For more information about the BCS program, visit Cisco Customer Experience - Business Critical Services

Built for the Future

The BCS OI API empowers our customers to access valuable insights which allow them to use traditional static reports in new and innovative ways leading to increased productivity and opening automation doors previously considered impossible.

The BCS OI API makes insights actionable and can support network automation.
As an example, imagine a new critical PSIRT: Instead of making a manual inventory based on a report, the API tells you instantly what devices are vulnerable. Feed this (automatically) into your Network Operations and Management Systems, and create work items for your teams to take ownership of and drive the business risk to zero.

It can open the door to full network automation if you use network orchestration software that performs patching autonomously.

API Portfolio

The BCS OI API is RESTful, easy to use, extensible, secure, and adhere to several industry best practices such as RFC 7232. The BCS OI API supports the standard HTTP verbs GET, POST, PUT and DELETE. The REST endpoint accepts and returns HTTPS messages that contain JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) documents.

The following are the BCS OI API resources:

  • Inventory - Returns information on devices and assets
  • Product Alerts - Returns information about Field Notices, PSIRTs, and EoX
  • Config Best Practice - Returns information on Cisco Best Practice device configuration violations
  • Syslog - Returns recommendations and identifies possible future issues by analyzing syslogs
  • Software Track - Returns information about conformance against software upgrade recommendations
  • Device Reset - Returns device crash or reset information
  • Risk Mitigation - Returns device risk metrics benchmarked against Cisco global data
  • Place In Network - Returns predicted functional roles and importance of devices
  • Unidentified Inventory - Returns devices not managed by any collector
  • Device Groups - Returns logical groups in which devices are sub-divided
  • Contracts - Returns contract information by serial number
  • Collectors - Returns information about the Cisco collectors deployed