Introduction - Crosswork Planning API

Crosswork Planning API

Crosswork Planning, the latest addition to the Crosswork Automation suite, provides a comprehensive suite of tools to empower operators to proactively manage their network infrastructure. These tools offer capabilities for network discovery, analysis, simulation, and optimization.

With Crosswork Planning, operators can unlock a host of benefits, including enhanced visibility and insights, improved performance, reliability, and resiliency, and efficient capacity management.

Key Benefits

Enhanced Visibility and Insights: Crosswork Planning offers visualizations of topology and traffic utilization, along with insights into traffic demands and their behavior under changing network conditions, for both RSVP and segment routing-based LSPs.

Improved Performance, Reliability, and Resiliency: At the core of Crosswork Planning is a predictive AI-based simulation engine that aims to mimic real-world behavior, allowing for a digital twin representation of the deployed network. These capabilities help identify potential issues and enable optimizations to improve the quality of experience for end users. It can help identify possible weaknesses in the network and provide actionable insights to enhance reliability and resiliency.

Capacity Management: Crosswork Planning provides comprehensive toolsets for a holistic approach to capacity management. These help operators evaluate the most effective physical topology and determine the capacity needed (and its location) to support continued growth. Crosswork Planning also provides tools for offline traffic optimization to allow for the most efficient routing of demands, allowing operators to maximize their return on investment (ROI) on their deployed network infrastructure.

Crosswork Planning builds an abstracted model of the IP/SR-MPLS network that contains the topology, traffic, and state. The Crosswork Planning model incorporates multivendor devices participating in the IGP (OSPF or IS-IS) and can extend to include the Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) topology in the future.

Network planning, engineering, and operations can use the Crosswork Planning Design application to evaluate network models and run simulation and optimization tools offline. Other applications and scripts can also use the Crosswork Planning Design & Optimization and Prediction Module (OPM) Libraries to evaluate the model on the server engine. Most, if not all the model-building and simulation capabilities of Crosswork Planning are available through the API. This opens up a myriad of possibilities for automating repetitive or tedious tasks pertaining to offline planning.

Some of the possible use cases could include,

Performing network optimization as a result of network or user driven events, or at a user-defined cadence.
Performing simulation analysis in view of topology changes, to mitigate risks to the network.

Crosswork Planning offers an intuitive web-based interface, enabling operators to proactively manage networks with tools for enhanced visibility, performance, reliability, resiliency, and efficient capacity management. These capabilities are available through a programmatic API, allowing customers to automate tasks and achieve higher efficiency.

Crosswork Planning REST API

The Crosswork Planning REST API is a programmatic interface that uses REST architecture. The API accepts and returns HTTPS messages that contain JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) payloads. You can use any programming language to generate the messages and the JSON that contain the API methods or Managed Object (MO) descriptions.

The GUIs of Crosswork Planning and its services also use the REST API. The system uses the REST API to read information for display and to write configuration changes when they occur.

Crosswork Planning Design & OPM Library

The Crosswork Planning Design Library exposes functionality and objects that are used by the Design product suite. It does that via a Remote Procedure Call (RPC) mechanism, handled by the Crosswork Planning Design API Service. The Crosswork Planning Design API Service is a daemon that listens to Crosswork Planning Design requests and processes them, managing objects, and performing operations such as simulation and optimization. Multiple clients can connect to the same service, from different machines and processes.

The Crosswork Planning OPM Python Library is a wrapper around the existing Design Libraries. The Design Library maximizes application efficiency and flexibility for developers. The Crosswork Planning OPM Python Libraries on the other hand, leveraging the Design Libraries, aims to provide most of the same functionality but with an easy to use and intuitive interface.

Crosswork Planning offers a Design & OPM Libraries Package, downloadable from Cisco Software Central, and supports the Linux environment. Using the Libraries Package, users may write and execute scripts using Design/OPM Libraries, outside of Crosswork Planning on a Linux host locally by connecting to desingapi service running on the Crosswork Planning Virtual Machine.

The Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol secures communication between the server and clients. SSL certificates secure the communication. All requests require authentication. To execute requests, the Crosswork user credentials used must have admin access to the server. Users obtain authorization by generating a ticket with a POST request to the Crosswork crosswork/sso/v1/tickets API.