Enterprise Streaming Telemetry and You: Getting Started with Model Driven Telemetry

Why Streaming Telemetry?

Cisco IOS XE is the Network Operating System for the Enterprise. It runs on switches like the Catalyst 9000, routers like the ASR 1000, CSR1000v, and ISR 1000 and 4000’s, Catalyst 9800 Wireless LAN controllers, as well as a few other devices in IoT and Cable product lines. Since the IOS XE 16.6 release there has been support for model driven telemetry, which provides network operators with additional options for getting information from their network.

Traditionally SNMP has been highly successful for monitoring enterprise networks, but it has limitations: unreliable transport, inconsistent encoding between versions, limited filtering and data retrieval options, as well as the impact to the CPU and memory of the running device when multiple Network Monitoring Solutions poll the device simultaneously. Model-Driven Telemetry addresses many of the shortfalls of legacy monitoring capabilities and provides an additional interface in which telemetry is now available to be published from.

Yes, this is a push based feature. No longer do we need to poll the device and ask for operational state. Now we just decide what data we need, how often we need it, and where to send it. Once the configuration is in place the device happily publishes the telemetry data out to the 3rd party collectors, your monitoring tools, big data search and visualization engines like Splunk and Elastic, or even to a simple text file – it’s totally configurable what you do with the data. In the example below we use Telegraf + InfluxDB + Grafana to receive, store, and visualize the data.

Once common use case is to monitor the CPU utilization of a device. Let’s understand where and how we can get this data from our Cisco Catalyst 9300 running IOS XE 16.10

YANG Models

YANG Models are at the heart of Model-Driven Telemetry: Yet Another Next Generation! These human-readable text-based models define the data that is available not just telemetry publication but also for programmatic configuration as well. These data models reside within the IOS XE device and can easily be downloaded when using tooling like YANG-Explorer. All of the models are also published on the YangModels Github page which makes them easy to access and analyze.

The YANG-explorer tooling is available on the CiscoDevNet Github page which can download the YANG models directly from the IOS XE device over the NETCONF or RESTCONF interfaces and quickly show which data is available and from which model.

This example from the YANG Explorer shows that we have already downloaded and loaded the Cisco-IOS-XE-process-cpu-oper.yang model and began to explore it. It shows that the one-minute, five-minute, and 5-second “Busy CPU-Utilization” is available as a percent, as well as the Interrupt 5-second (five-second-intr) metric. It also shows some metadata about the model that includes the XPath, Prefix, Namespace, and a description with some other details.

Cisco IOS XE MDT Configuration

Now that we know which YANG data model contains the needed information let’s enable sending this telemetry from the device.

It is possible to configure and verify telemetry subscriptions from the traditional CLI as well as through the NETCONF, RESTCONF, and gNMI programmatic interfaces using YANG. When using CLI the show commands are available with the ‘show telemetry ietf’ set of commands, and is configured similarly with ‘telemetry ietf’ commands when in configure mode. When using YANG, the “Cisco-IOS-XE-mdt-cfg.yang” and “Cisco-IOS-XE-mdt-oper.yang” YANG models are available for both configuration and operational datasets.

Lets look at a configuration example from a Catalyst 9300 switch running Cisco IOS XE 16.10 This configuration enables telemetry subscription ID 501 and encoding is set to “kvgbp” which is a self describing JSON key-value pare Google Protocol Buffers format. The data that we want sent is defined by the filter xpath and we used YANG Explorer and the YANG models earlier to find it. The xpath filter prefix for the Cisco-IOS-XE-process-cpu-oper.yang model is “process-cpu-ios-xe-oper.yang”, and the specific datapoint or KPI we want is the 5-second CPU Utilization. The source address and source VRF are set so that the device knows which port or interface to send telemetry from. The update policy is set in centiseconds so every 5 seconds (500 centiseconds) the device will publish an update. Finally, the IP and port that the receiver is listening on is set, as well as the to use gRPC over TCP as the protocol.

Cat9300# show run | sec tel

telemetry ietf subscription 501

 encoding encode-kvgpb

 filter xpath /process-cpu-ios-xe-oper:cpu-usage/cpu-utilization/five-seconds

 source-address 10.60.0.19

 source-vrf Mgmt-vrf

 stream yang-push

 update-policy periodic 500

 receiver ip address 10.12.252.224 57000 protocol grpc-tcp

Let’s see what this looks like with some of the show commands: ‘show telemetry ietf subscription 501 detail’ and ‘show telemetry ietf subscription 501 receiver’:

The output shows that the CPU Utilization XPath has been set and that the telemetry receiver has connected successfully.

Telemetry Receiver

The open source software stack that allows easy reception, decoding, and processing of the “kvgbp” telemetry is referred to as the TIG stack. TIG represents three separate software components: Telegraf which receives the telemetry data, InfluxDB which stores it, and Grafana which is responsible for visualizations and alerting.

Telegraf has the “cisco_telemetry_mdt” input plugin that receives and decodes the gRPC payloads that the IOS XE device sends. It also has an output plugin that sends this data into the InfluxDB where it is stored. The configuration for Telegraf is simple and static because once it’s setup it rarely needs to be reconfigured or modified. Simply define a few global parameters, the input, the output, and then start the telegraf binary or daemon process.

In this example we configure the gRPC input listener on port 57000 – this is the port that IOS XE will publish telemetry to. We have also configured where to send the data out to: InfluxDB running on the localhost, port 8086, as well as the database, username, and password to use for the data base storage.

# telegraf.conf

# Global Agent Configuration

[agent]

hostname = "telemetry-container"

flush_interval = "15s"

interval = "15s"

# gRPC Dial-Out Telemetry Listener

[[inputs.cisco_telemetry_mdt]]

transport = "grpc-dialout"

service_address = ":57000"

# Output Plugin InfluxDB

[[outputs.influxdb]]

database = "telegraf"

urls = [ "http://127.0.0.1:8086" ]

username = "telegraf"

password = "your-influxdb-password-here"

InfluxDB and Grafana can run inside Docker containers or natively on Linux, and there is excellent getting started documentation on the official InfluxDB and Grafana websites. I recommend following the official guides in order to setup InfluxDB and Grafana in your environment as needed.

Visualization with Grafana

Grafana is the visualization engine that is used to display the telemetry data. It calls into InfluxDB to access the data that is stored there, which is the same data that Telegraf received from IOS XE. In this example there are three unique queries for each of the CPU metrics: five-seconds, five-minutes, and one-minute, and those are shown in the chart. We can see that the 5-second CPU average in green is between 1% and 2%, while the 1 minute CPU average in blue remains at 1%.

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Affirming Trustworthiness of Critical Infrastructure

In this blog, I will focus on how you can cryptographically gather evidence to affirm trustworthiness of your trusted network.

Earlier this year, at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Cisco announced Crosswork Trust Insights as a cloud-based SaaS offer that reports on the integrity of devices and provides advanced forensics for assured inventory. The visibility helps to maintain confidence in your trusted network infrastructure, and track potential concerns such as:

◈ Is my hardware authentic?

◈ Am I running the expected software?

◈ Are the firmware and OS verified to be genuine?

◈ Was there an unexpected software or hardware change?

Cisco is committed to continually enhance the security and resilience of its networking solutions. Delivering highly trusted and secure platforms involves relentless effort across technology innovations, rigorous certifications, best-in-class manufacturing and software development processes.

Figure 1: System Integrity is the Foundation of Trust

Building and maintaining trust demands reliable and verifiable reporting on device state. There is no feature on the device that can tell you whether it is trustworthy. Instead, you must gather evidence: a broad set of integrity measurements related to hardware, firmware and software (Figure 1). It begins in the hardware as the evidence needs to be cryptographically anchored to hardware-level root of trust. Such evidence need to be collected and verifiable, not just at the boot time, but also at runtime and retrospectively for ongoing affirmation of trust. The crucial component of such a solution is the visualization and reporting of evidence that can enable today’s service providers to track the trust posture of their network infrastructure components. Such a solution must have the following attributes:

◈ Cryptographically secured collection, evaluation and storage of evidence

◈ Automated feed of up-to-date fingerprints derived from manufacturing and software build processes to affirm hardware and software integrity

◈ Authoritative history of changes to the device state to establish traceability for forensic analysis. The key is reinforcing the truth based on verifiable evidence collected today, yesterday or in the past

◈ Hosted independently to safe-guard against insider threats

In releasing Cisco Crosswork Trust Insights, we introduced a secured mechanism backed by cryptographic proof for collecting data from your devices. This mechanism can be leveraged to gather verifiable evidence for a variety of use cases such as inventory and operational reporting, compliance verification or trust attestation. Accurate tracking of inventory changes and ability to prove retrospectively, what happened, when and how it happened, who did it, are critical to preserve assured inventory. The assessment can be augmented with trust data enabling integrity verification and detecting unanticipated changes. For example, when a router is upgraded, it is essential to gather evidence to verify what OS version it is running or if the version changed unexpectedly indicating a suspicious activity.

Figure 2: Cisco Crosswork Trust Insights

Crosswork Trust Insights reports on inventory changes and system integrity information with comprehensive coverage across hardware and software. It uses Cisco Crosswork Data Gateway as a proxy deployed in your network to collect data from network devices using a cryptographically secured channel. It validates the signatures and evaluates the collected evidence against the fingerprints provided by Cisco. Crosswork Trust Insights also provides secure off-site storage of evidence which can help ease compliance and forensics while safe-guarding against internal threats. All the information can be visualized and analyzed with intuitive dashboards and workflows.

For service providers, Web/OTT, and enterprises alike, a network is a mission-critical asset. Especially for service providers, the network enables delivery of business-critical services, new revenue streams, and business models. Trust is a key infrastructure pillar that can help you reinforce trustworthiness as a significant differentiator.

As we know, the security landscape will continue to expand, therefore Cisco is committed to transparency and accountability, acting as a trusted partner to our customers to address evolving security threats.

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Finding From Our Research Show Cognitive Collaboration is Needed and Wanted Now

For many business professionals, meeting collaboration tools have become critical to accomplishing their core goals and tasks every week. But are they effective enough?

Cognitive Collaboration Tools

Cisco recently partnered with Dimensional Research and surveyed 1501 business professionals globally from companies of all sizes on their use of and experiences with meeting collaboration solutions.

Given the critical connectivity online meetings provide, it’s concerning that 85% of respondents experience online meeting problems and 42% reached a level of frustration in just the last week. These are not rare occurrences as the research finds that nearly a quarter spend 50% of their time each day in meetings, while over 60% of all participants spend 2 or more hours in online meetings every day. The impact of an inadequate meeting solution is that in addition to frustrating users, it can waste significant amounts of time and lead to less productive meetings, a loss for both the individuals and the business.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. 89% of respondents said they want a cognitive collaboration solution to solve these issue with 50% willing to argue with their boss to get it.

Cognitive collaboration provides context and intelligence that’s woven throughout all collaboration experiences and involves AI-driven capabilities like virtual assistants and meeting attendee intelligence.

Virtual Assistants and Attendee Intelligence

Today most benefit from using Siri, Alexa, or Google’s virtual assistant to accomplish tasks such as calling or texting a friend, setting a reminder, or adding an item to a ‘to do’ list. Most have these virtual assistants on their phone, computer and in their home and know the value they bring. Not surprisingly, 87% of business professionals see direct value from including a meeting virtual assistance into their meeting collaboration tools. Even more professionals (89%), want their meeting tool to be smart, proactively providing information to meeting participants based the context of the meeting subject and attendees.

Attendees? Sure. When meeting with someone new, many professionals attempt to research more about them to become more knowledgeable and to make the meeting more effective. In fact, 81% stated that meeting effectiveness increases with attendee background information. For most business professionals this is often a quick check on LinkedIn. However, 66% shared that information on LinkedIn is insufficient for their needs. This leads to more time searching for information or just being less prepared for the meeting. Proactively providing thorough attendee and company information within a cognitive collaboration solution would be a boon to meeting hosts and attendees.

Intelligent Action Taking

Most meetings involve reviewing or referencing documents, discussing past action items and establishing new ones. 93% of participants believe that having current action items easily visible for all meeting participants, as well as instant access to relevant documents, would increase meeting effectiveness. This is something a cognitive solution could provide, along with tracking and displaying current action items and their progress.

The solution could also manage access to all relevant documents from within the solution, making it simple to share or find key documents as necessary. The research finds that 90% of business professionals indicated action item completion would increase with automated tracking and status reminders, and an intelligent meeting assistant could be asked to create and assign new action items, find a document, or start a quick collaboration session.

The Move to Cognitive Collaboration

Many workers find comfort in the tools they use every day: they know how a tool works and how to get things done. The time to learn and adopt to a new tool can be disruptive but 88% of participants are willing to switch tools to adopt a new solution with capabilities that a cognitive collaboration meeting solution could provide. The reality is their current tool is not meeting their expectations and frustrating them. In fact, nearly 9 out of 10 respondents stated they want to use cognitive collaboration solutions as soon as possible. With the potential benefits of a cognitive solution with an intelligent meeting assistant, it’s time for a change.

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New Tunable DWDM 10Gb Transceiver For Extended Reach On All SFP+ Ports

It is estimated that approximately 22 million*, 10Gb/s Ethernet transceivers were shipped industry-wide in 2018.  Transceivers have numerous applications from mobile backhaul to connecting switches and servers in data centers.  With the multiple applications come varied requirements for reach on the transceivers.  Some pass traffic for only a few meters but ultra-extended reach transceivers must transmit over 80km.  At a distance of 80km the optical signal will accumulate a significant amount of distortion due to chromatic dispersion and will require electronic dispersion compensation (EDC) in order to create a usable electronic signal.

Not all Cisco platforms have ports that incorporate EDC.  This means that ultra-extended reach linear transceivers such as Cisco’s DWDM-SFP10G-C cannot be used on certain Cisco hosts. To fill that gap, Cisco has released a limiting electrical interface ultra-extended reach transceiver (DWDM-SFP10G-C-S ).

The heart of most 10G optical transceivers are the transmitter and receiver optical sub-assemblies (TOSA and ROSA). The ROSA is composed of a photodiode that converts the optical signal to photocurrent and the transimpedance amplifier (TIA) that converts the photocurrent to voltage, creating the useable electronic signal.  There are two possible flavors of the receiver. Depending on the SFP+ architecture, either a limiting or linear electrical interface will be implemented in the module.

The output of a linear receiver remains proportional to the power of the received optical signal. In a limiting receiver there is an additional limiting amplifier stage and a comparator to boost the variable amplitude of the preceding amplification stage to a constant limited amplitude.  The limiting receiver output is either high or low and “limited” by the voltage output of the comparator.

Figure 1. The block diagram shows two different SFP+ module implementations one linear and one limiting.

Figure 2. Voltage Output of Limiting and Linear Receivers

The linear receiver utilizes equalization and filtering to compensate for distortion.  In the SFP+ form factor the equalization and filtering are performed by a separate EDC (electronic dispersion compensation) PHY which must be present on the host port.  The EDC processes the received electronic signal and compensates for distortion to achieve better signal integrity over longer distances.  Therefore, in general, linear receivers can support greater reach than their limiting receiver counterparts.

Recently, advances have been made that allow limiting transceivers to support a reach that is comparable to that of linear transceivers.  The existing tunable DWDM transceiver that Cisco offers is a linear interface electrical transceiver (DWDM-SFP10G-C). Cisco has recently released a new limiting electrical interface transceiver (DWDM-SFP10G-C-S). The limiting DWDM-SFP10G-C-S is specified for a reach of 70km, whereas the linear transceiver DWDM-SFP10G-C has a reach of 80km.

It may appear that the new  limiting interface transceiver has a shorter reach than the linear interface transceiver. However, keep in mind that the 70km specification is based on a worst case fiber chromatic dispersion assumption of 20 ps/nm-km. The ITU G.652 standard specifies a typical fiber chromatic dispersion of 17 ps/nm-km, which corresponds to a reach of 82km.

Figure 3. Reach Differences

As previously mentioned the linear receiver requires EDC on the host port.  Not all Cisco platforms have ports that incorporate EDC.  For instance, neither Catalyst nor Nexus ports have EDC.  Furthermore, since EDC consumes additional power, routers limit the number of ports on a platform that support EDC.  For example, the NCS5501-SE has 24 ports that incorporate EDC and 16 that do not. DWDM-SFP10G-C-S closes this gap as it can be plugged into any SFP+ port regardless of whether that port incorporates EDC.

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Cisco DNA Center’s Network Assurance and Analytics Leaves the Competition Behind

Today’s networks need Network Assurance

Network health is an important aspect of any network operation, and historically, network admins use network monitoring to keep a check on the overall health of the network. However, monitoring every part of the network often requires multiple tools which only provides a fragmented view into the network.

As the network scales and expands, the complexity in monitoring the events and data associated with a growing pool of users, things, applications and network devices rises exponentially. And replicating an issue as it occurs poses a considerable challenge. As a result, typically network admins spend more time collecting the data from different sources and tools than they do analyzing and troubleshooting the issues. Which impacts both IT and business productivity.

Network assurance and analytics solutions are designed to address these challenges by taking raw data from various sources and presenting it as actionable insights on a dashboard. So now, instead of scrambling through the data or trying to replicate the issue, a network admin knows the type of the problem, the severity of it, number of clients affected, and the location where the issue exists.

How does Cisco DNA Assurance Stack Up?

The Assurance and Analytics market is crowded with both established and emerging vendors that claim to offer full-service assurance solutions. Most vendors offer assurance capabilities in a silo: there is no holistic view of the network. Cisco DNA Assurance provides end-to-end, contextual network analytics and insights through real-time data and telemetry it collects network-wide. It also offers distinct capabilities under a single-pane-of-glass dashboard, such as Intelligent Capture, Sensor-driven Tests and Apple Wi-Fi Analytics.

And now we’ve recently added Cisco AI Network Analytics to the Cisco DNA Center arsenal, which brings the power of machine learning to better pinpoint problems and provide more accurate remediation guidance.

How do the others stack up to Cisco DNA Assurance?

Aruba Assurance has three separate wireless assurance solutions:

◈ Aruba NetInsight, a cloud-based assurance platform

◈ Aruba User Experience Insight (previously known as Cape Networks), a sensor-based assurance platform

◈ Connectivity Health, a part of Aruba Airwave platform.

Huawei has two solutions:

◈ CampusInsight, their network assurance platform

◈ eSight, their network management system which offers monitoring and basic diagnostics

Miercom Puts Cisco DNA Assurance to the Test

Miercom, a 3rd party vendor, produced an independent report that compares the publicly available versions of Cisco DNA Center, Huawei eSight and Aruba Connectivity Health. Miercom tested four issues that are common in any network and gauged how each platform helps a network admin to troubleshoot and resolve them.

What was tested?

◈ DHCP Problem: DHCP pool exhaustion, which can leave clients stranded without an IP address after they connect to an access point.

◈ RF Issues: How the systems dealt with a wireless client that was forced to join a crowded 2.4GHz band as the client couldn’t properly connect to the weak signal of the 5GHz radio of the access point

◈ Proactive Testing: The ability to proactively monitor the network via sensors and sensor-driven tests so that a potential issue or an anomaly can be detected and resolved before it turns into a major alert.

◈ Troubleshooting: The diagnostic efficiency of the Assurance platform to isolate a device or interface where a problem exists by examining the network topology through tools such as path trace

What were the results of the tests?

Cisco DNA Assurance:

Miercom concluded that Cisco DNA Center performed the best of all the tested platforms. It excelled in each test case by offering a detailed root cause analysis and step by step remediations for each issue.

Source: Miercom

The Cisco active sensor supports more than twice the test cases than Aruba Connectivity Health Sensors. Only Cisco offers a view of the physical connection of the devices with health as well as a logical connection through path trace tool that gives a full view of the end-to-end connection of a client.

The Competition:

Aruba Connectivity Health partially satisfies some of the use cases, but it doesn’t go beyond basic pre-connection statistics and lacks in providing detailed analysis of a network problem. Huawei eSight attempts to display some RF related issues but, like any network monitoring tool, it forces a network admin to search for an issue rather than displaying it on the dashboard for faster analysis and resolution.

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Word of Mouth is an Even Bigger Deal for B2B than B2C

Ninety-one percent of anything is a big deal, which is why you need to pay attention to this: ninety-one percent of B2B purchases are influenced by word of mouth.

A study by Blanc & Otus and G2Crowd shows the impact of recommendations and referrals in B2B is actually far greater than B2C, due to the considered nature of most purchases. Nobody is going to make a decision or give you money unless they’ve checked you out — unless they’ve vetted you — with a current customer first.

As businesses, we assume our customers talk about us. We assume our customers tell our story. But we leave our customers to their own devices to do this. For something that’s as important as word of mouth, we’re way too hands-off. Most businesses don’t have a word of mouth strategy. At best, we’re doing word of mouth on accident.

I recently released Talk Triggers, a book about word of mouth, which I co-authored with Daniel Lemin. A Talk Trigger is a strategic, operational differentiator a business adopts to create conversation and a marketing advantage. A Talk Trigger has four key components:

1. It Must Be Remarkable.If it’s not worth remarking on, it’s not remarkable.
2. It Must Be Relevant. Doing something just to get noticed is not a Talk Trigger.
3. It Must Be Reasonable.A Talk Trigger is remarkable enough to be a conversation catalyst but reasonable enough to be trusted.
4. It Must Be Repeatable. A Talk Trigger must be available to every customer, every time.

A Talk Trigger isn’t a PR gimmick, it’s not a surprise-and-delight tactic. Like I said, it’s a strategic, operational differentiator your customers wantto talk about. Here are three examples of B2B companies that are word of mouth pioneers.

Spiceworks

Back in 2006, Austin-based Spiceworks decided it would upend the established protocol for software provision and use, and would instead, give its software away to IT professionals to manage their networks for free. The company was motivated by a realization that IT professionals have tough jobs. At the time, they didn’t have a common set of tools to help them.

Spiceworks launched a product suite that allowed IT pros to scan their computing network, monitor up-time, and track issues or problems via a built-in digital help desk. It monetized through highly-targeted and highly-tailored ads.

To get feedback from early users, Spiceworks set up a web page where customers could submit product ideas. Users voted by “spicing up” or “spicing down” the suggestions they were most interested in. Spiceworks realized the collaboration and community needs of IT professionals superseded their software needs, and it formed an online support group.

As conversations grew, developed and morphed into longer threads that covered topics beyond IT, Spiceworks knew it was on to something. In 2010, Spiceworks opened the community to non-customers. That’s when word of mouth kicked in. That’s when people started to tell their friends and colleagues that if they were in IT, they needed to go to the Spiceworks community. It was THE place to be.

FreshBooks

The accounting and bookkeeping software company, Freshbooks, executes its Talk Trigger a little differently. Its “I Make A Living” program is a traveling series of events where the company goes to its customers.

Let me explain.

Freshbooks’ customers are self-employed. Their businesses span a range of industries from interior design to accounting to plumbing. When Freshbooks first began, it was small. Its founder, Mike McDerment, was cautious about spending money on travel for conferences and events.

On a trip to New York, McDerment decided to email some customers and invite them to dinner. This idea turned into an entire program. Today, when Freshbookers (employees) travel they seek out customers and organize group dinners with them. Sometimes the group is 20 people, other times it’s 120. The dinners are done at no-cost to Freshbooks’ customers.

These events connect business owners in the same community, an opportunity not everyone has. The dinners have led to a series of live events, known as #IMakeALiving, where Freshbooks brings in authors, speakers and experts to share information with their customers. It’s all free, and the program generates considerable word of mouth.

Amazon Web Services

This last one is a bit of a cheat, but it’s an example I recently shared as a guest on the #FlipMyFunnel podcast hosted by ABM extraordinaire, Sangram Vajre. Sangram asked me for a Martech example, and I thought of Amazon Web Services.

If Amazon Web Services adds capacity, services, or adds to a data center to the point where costs go down as it scales up, they email their customers in the region — proactively — and alert them their bill will be lower beginning next month. This is a tremendous example of a company doing something its customers do not expect.

This example is not a true Talk Trigger because, at this point, it’s not repeatable. Remember the four key components? Amazon Web Services only does this in regions that have cost savings. If it happened to every customer, it’d be one of the most tremendous Talk Triggers I’ve seen.

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Cisco CCENT Certification: Jump start your career in the IT Networking Field

ICND1 and ICND2 are the most popular Cisco certifications that will qualify you to start your career as a network engineer. Some applicants prefer taking the composite exam, but some others prefer to take both the exams separately. ICND1 is the entry-level exam, and it qualifies you to manage different devices in an organization. At the same time, ICND2 is the Associate level exam that gives a notable boost to your skills.

And it allows you to understand the connection between various devices. Here, we are going to talk about the CCENT ICND1 certification exam. You’d be able to receive CCENT certification after passing this exam. The competition in the networking industry has grown nowadays so, and you may not be able to get a job without this certification.

However, CCENT certification is still important if you are willing to develop excellent basic skills. If you thought to take the composite exam for CCNA, you’d find it challenging to complete the entire syllabus that is available for this exam. Therefore, it is advisable that you should take these exams independently. Thus, you’d be able to pass the exam, and you’d also score higher marks in the exam.

• ICND1 Certification: The Stepping Stone for All Cisco Certifications and Careers

If you wish to become an expert in the networking industry, then CCENT certification is a must for you as it helps you strengthen your skills gradually and open a broad array of opportunities for career promotion.

How to become CCENT certified?

The applicants that take CCENT exam usually have an intention of becoming CCNP Routing & Switching certified, although you can prefer any field you want to progress in, for instance in security, design, Data Center, Cyber Ops, Wireless, etc. So, if you also have the chosen Routing and Switching specialization, then CCENT certification is the first step you are going to take. Then you’d have to pass the CCNA certification exam. And the final step you are going to take is to pass the CCNP Routing & Switching certification exam, which is a combination of three different exams. Once you have successfully followed through all these steps, you’d be acknowledged as CCNP Routing & Switching certified.

CCENT Exam Details

The Cisco 100-105 exam is just like any other exam: there is a fixed exam structure that is occasionally updated, but it prevails the same for the most part. Currently, the CCENT exam consists of 45-55 questions, and all of them must be answered in 90 minutes. Take your time with each question, but keep in mind the time limit. With so many difficult questions to answer, time management is essential.

The CCENT exam questions come from different syllabus topics, but five main ones make up most of the Cisco 100-105 exam. They are as follows:

• LAN Switching Fundamentals (26%)
• Routing Fundamentals (25%)
• Network Fundamentals (20%)
• Infrastructure Services (15%)
• Infrastructure Maintenance (14%)

Tips for Passing the Cisco CCENT Certification Exam

The Cisco 100-105 exam is just like any other exams, and you will have to prepare yourself properly to pass it with a flying score. First of all, you require to understand that you have to start your preparation promptly. You should begin a few months before the exam is scheduled so that you have sufficient time to study. Remember that if you get your hands on this certification, then it can do wonders for you, so work hard and try to pass the exam it on the first attempt.

Making Schedule is an important part of thinking about when it comes to preparation for Cisco exams because there are quite a few topics that you need to study, and you have to give each topic the proper time that it demands. If you have created a study plan, then make sure that you follow it strictly. Otherwise, it will be meaningless.

The Cisco 100-105 exam is not exactly new, so it will be easy for you to obtain many study resources on the Internet. There are many online forums where people from all around the world come together to talk about this test. Participate in these communities and interact with other applicants there. All these people can turn out to be a precious asset because they can give you links for other sources that you can take to prepare for the exam. Some of them might also share their experience of how they studied for the Cisco 100-105 certification exam.

• How to Prepare for CCENT Certification Exam?

While you are at it, you should also study from the official study guide. It will inform you about the main topics that you need to concentrate on, and what the exam will be all about. Use this study resource to your benefit and stay close to it because the information included in it can help you pass the exam on the first try.

The practice is always an advantage, and you should never ignore that. If you wish to practice for the 100-105 exam, then the Internet is your best friend. Here you can find many platforms that offer Cisco CCENTpractice tests, which consist of the questions that have been written by seasoned and experienced professionals. Take as many of these practice tests as you can because this is the closest you can get to the actual exam environment. Some of these practice tests might also display you your result at the end, and this way, you can assess your skills before the actual CCENT exam. You can then identify the topics that demand more learning and start focusing on them.

CCENT Recertification

Having taken the CCENT is like always beneficial. CCENT Certification has a validity period of 3 years. This indicates that you have a duration of 3 years to recertify by passing any of the following listed exams. Take a look in here.

• ICND1 exam;
• CCDE written exam;
• Current CCIW written exam;
• CCAr (Cisco certified architect)
• Current associate level;
• Current 642-XXX professional level;
• Current CCDE practical exam;

Why is the CCENT certification so Popular?

CCENT certification is the first step in your journey of becoming a network engineer. And the significance of becoming a network engineer is apparent to all. So, that is the significant reason due to which CCENT certification has become popular. Another primary reason is that it supports you to become strong right from the start. And the things you are going to receive while studying for the CCENT exam here will help you throughout your career in the networking industry. Therefore, many applicants prefer taking this certification before proceeding to the next step.

Reasons to become CCENT certified

If you are willing to enhance your skills to the expert level in the networking field, then CCENT certification is vital for you. The topics you are going to learn in the CCENT exam preparation will never fade from your memory and they will help you out at every step of the Cisco career path. CCENT plays a leading role in clearing your concepts about the things that are required already to understand in CCNA. So, you must take advantage of this certification to sharpen your necessary skills in the Networking industry.

• The CCENT confirms your networking knowledge tangible. Getting a Cisco certification proves that you perceive something about networking; networks make computing happen and connect every person in the world. Why not start with a certification that applies broadly to just about any IT job or task?
• Earning the CCENT requires passing only one exam. Obtaining a certification by passing just one test will raise your confidence and prepare you for the longer Cisco certification paths such as the Cisco Certified Network Professional (CCNP) certification.
• Certification helps demonstrate your expertise to your boss. Having CCENT certification reminds your management and colleagues of your skill every time they approach you.
• The CCENT is a stepping stone for the higher level CCNA certification. Passing the single CCNA exam can be very challenging — it's much easier to pass two smaller exams that you can more easily study for. By passing the CCENT certification exam, you're halfway on the path to obtaining your CCNA. With CCENT certification, you can jump-start your career in the IT networking field.

The CCENT certificate works more like a stepping stone towards other Cisco certificate programs. Upon passing the single networking, exam assures you that you are ready for the rest of the certificate modules. This also forms a pathway to the more in-demand certification that is the CCNA certification.

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