Cisco Smart Software Manager (Demo)

[Music] hi i made this short instructional video to explain the benefits of smart licensing and to show you how easy it is to manage your licenses using the cisco smart software manager so what is the difference between traditional and smart licenses anyways remember how you had to touch every single switch and router in your enterprise to manually install a license file using the product activation key well what if you don't have to do that anymore now with cisco smart licensing all your cisco devices can phone home to the cisco cloud and register themselves automatically and here's another pain point what about when you automate your devices it is a real big challenge to get that license to transfer from the old broken down switch to the new replacement switch that you got but with cisco smart licensing transferring of licenses from one device to another is very simple and i'll show you how to do that in my video so let me ask you this question do you have a way to manage and view all the licenses that you have purchased and actually monitor the usage of those licenses to understand if they're pushed out properly and are actually on the devices that they're supposed to be on do you have a way to do that in a centralized location or do you have to touch every single switch to see the status of that license cisco smart licensing is all automated for you and the best part is what's really cool is it's in the cloud so cisco smart software manager is a cloud-based solution that manages all of your license needs all of your licenses are stored securely on cisco servers up in the cloud and can be accessed by you at any time so there are some of the benefits of cisco smart licensing and now you know the differences between the traditional licenses and the benefits of the smart licenses so now i want to go ahead and show you how to use the cisco smart software manager or the portal as i like to call it here we are at cisco software central where we can manage our licenses using the smart software manager let's go ahead and click on smart software licensing and we can view our alerts inventory convert to smart licensing reports preferences on-prem accounts and activities under alerts in this example you can see that our licenses have expired if there were anything important in here it would be listed here for you to find out and then if we look to the right there's 276 minor alerts listed we can change the view down here from 10 to 200 and it will list all of our alerts for us and we can take action on them under inventory this is where you can manage your registration tokens so let's take a look at how to do that to create a new token we click on new token we give it a description and set the expiration in days the default is 30 days however you can set it from 1 to 365 days and then we just say create token once the token is created it will be listed here i do want to spend a little bit of time talking about virtual accounts what is a virtual account anyway a virtual account is basically a way for you to organize and manage all of your smart licenses you can have as many virtual accounts as you'd like and you can name it anything you'd like by default out of the box you're gonna get what's called the default virtual account which is what you see here in this example if i had multiple virtual accounts there would be a drop down button right beside the name of the virtual account that i could click on and it will give me the list and i can just transfer between one virtual account to the other and list out the licenses that are within them let's click on licenses and here we can notice all the licenses that we have purchased we'll be able to identify how many of them are actually in use and what the balance is now i want to show you what happens if we dig deeper into the license we can go ahead and scroll down and choose one of these licenses to connect to but before we do that let's change the view the default view is 10 i like to change it to 200 so we can see more let's go ahead and choose the appropriate license for this example we're going to choose firepower and within the firepower license we can see that we have a graphical representation of how many are actually purchased and how many are in use now what i really like about this area is the transaction history under transaction history we can find out when our licenses were expired as you can see here the license sku is called out along with the transaction date and the license expiration which is very important for us and it was just that easy to find now if we want to transfer one of these licenses all we have to do is click the plus sign beside the license click the box go to available actions and say transfer now once we're here we're going to have to select what virtual account we want to transfer this license to we would hit the drop down button and we can choose the virtual account that we want to transfer the license to once we do that we can come over here and type in the number of licenses that we would like to transfer and then choose the transfer button and you're done it's just that easy let's go ahead and take a look how to convert smart licenses so here we have our traditional licenses and we want to go ahead and convert them to smart licensing so how do we do that we go ahead and choose the license that we're interested in converting and click on convert license and then follow the wizard it's so simple so here we can choose the virtual account that we're interested in click the box say next and convert license the license has been converted pretty simple let's take a look at reports in the event you need to generate a license summary you can do that in here choose what type of report you're interested in give it a description choose the virtual account that you're going to run the report from and choose the type of license that you're interested in and then say run report this is what your sample report would look like under preferences we can choose to receive a daily notification email by checking this box right here and also we can pick and choose what we want to be notified on by default all of them get turned on and then we just say save and a default notification will be sent to us every single day when one of these things happens under activity it basically gives us a log of the different licensed transactions that have occurred within the portal and under the event log it's a standard event log that we're all accustomed to and it basically just calls out anything that's a need to know basis there you have it it's just that easy to manage your licenses using the cisco smart software manager and if you have any questions please do not hesitate to reach out to me thank you so much for watching this video and i'll see you next time you

Channel: TechGlamTV

Views: 363

Keywords: Cisco, CSSM, Smart License, Smart License Software Manager, Demo, How To, Instructional Video, Training Video

Id: b6yCFLksN-I

Length: 8min 48sec (528 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 17 2020