Telemetry Curation in Provider Connectivity Assurance (Released September 2025)
As of September 2025, Provider Connectivity Assurance introduced the new Ingestion Staging feature to empower CX and Partners to more easily curate telemetry in Provider Connectivity Assurance.
Previous Behavior: Automatic Telemetry Ingestion curated via APIs
Prior to this feature release, any new telemetry objects received from a Sensor Collector would automatically appear in the "openmetrics" category in Settings -> Ingestion, and the user would trigger the data flow by toggling on metrics. Behind the scenes, this process would automatically generate an "ingestion dictionary," a set of definitions of each object type and its associated metrics. However, these automatically-created ingestion dictionaries came with several limitations:
- No units of measure were set by default; units had to be added later through a cumbersome API editing process that required assistance from a tenant admin.
- Object names were automatically generated, often resulting in long and difficult-to-decipher names.
- Each incoming metric created a new column in the platform database schema, unless configuration files were meticulously managed to use a specific 'raw analytics' variable name-something that was not straightforward for most CX/Partner delviery teams who are building telemetry ingestion.
While automatic object creation is convenient in some cases, these limitations made the process difficult to author an object type with meaningful names and metric values and units of measure. As a result, a more flexible authoring feature was needed to improve usability and data consistency.
What's New
The Ingestion Staging feature offers an alternative to this process. If the feature is not enabled, the current feature of "automatic" creation of object ingestion dictionaries, and availability of those in the 'openmetrics' section, continues to operate as-is. If this feature is enabled, the behaviour changes such that all new object types that are discovered are available in a staging area first, rather than adding their ingestion dictionaries (object and metric definitions) directly to the platform. Here, in the staging area, users can:
- Review and edit new incoming objects
- Discard any incoming metrics that are not required
- Assign meaningful metric and object names
- Specify units of measure
- Publish their ingestion dictionary for the Provider Connectivity Assurance platform
This ensures that, once published, Provider Connectivity Assurance displays exactly the metrics and units you intend, with user-friendly object names. This makes the customers network data easier to understand and use.
Metric Harmonization
An additional benefit of this feature is that the user interface proposes existing metrics that match by name. For example, if a user imports a "Jitter" metric from a third-party device, the User Interface recommends reusing the existing "Jitter" metric in Provider Connectivity Assurance. This harmonization enables "apples-to-apples" comparisons across telemetry sources, ensuring dashboards provide cohesive and consistent data-regardless of whether metrics originate from an Assurance Sensor or a Telemetry Object.
A Note About Assurance Sensor Sessions:
Provider Connectivity Assurance and the suite of Assurance Sensors provide default session types (such as TWAMP-SF). These session types are viewable using the new Ingestion Staging feature, but cannot be edited. Unlike user-defined telemetry objects (which users can edit and customize for their specific use cases), session metrics are directly linked to what is being collected by the proprietary Assurance Sensor. This ensures the integrity and accuracy of session data as defined by Cisco's Assurance Sensor technology.
Key Benefits
- Improved data quality and user-friendly nomenclature in dashboards
- Easier for CX and Partners to build new Telemetry ingestion solutions for customer use cases
- Easier metric management and harmonization
- Greater control over metric names and units
Learn More:
See this article for more details about this new feature.