Smart Call Home for ISE - what's it for??

[Arne Bier]

My customer is using Smart Licensing in ISE 2.3 and according to the ISE Admin Guide, this means that SCH is automatically enabled.

We had issues with Smart Licensing because it doesn't communicate to tools.cisco.com via the configured proxy (CSCvd93008, CSCvh77224)

Does SCH also try to talk via the configured ISE Proxy?  And if so, does it need to talk to tools.cisco.com ?  I need to know this in order to whitelist this on our proxy.  We currently have both PAN nodes whitelisted on the proxy to access tools.cisco.com

I can't tell what's going on with my SCH on my ISE 2.3p1 system - when I click on the menu option the wheels just spin and nothing happens.

Smart Call Home seems like an internal tool because if I follow the Cisco docs, and browse to tools.cisco.com/sch and log in, it tells me I need to contact some internal Cisco website because my CEC access is not allowed.

My PAN crashed again today and I didn't receive any emails from Smart Call Home telling me about this (again, this email feature mentioned in the ISE Admin Guide) - how is this feature supposed to work in the real world?

[ldanny]

SCH is indeed internal to Cisco.

Please find the information in the following link.

https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/td/docs/switches/lan/smart_call_home/QuickStart_ISE.pdf

[Arne Bier · Accepted solution]

What about this link below?

Introduction to Cisco Smart Call Home - Cisco

Where it clearly states that you need to access the Smart Call Home web application at https://tools.cisco.com/sch - when I did this I was told that my CEC login was denied and that I had to ask my manager for OnRamp access (these are all internal Cisco concepts).

The ISE documentation is confusing when it says that if Smart Licensing is enabled, then by default, so is Smart Call Home.  That is still unclear to me.  

If ISE uses Smart Call Home, then in what situations will I be informed (in a 'smart way') that there is an issue with my ISE platform?  I am not using a UCS appliance.  Therefore what other cool stuff can SCH alert me about?

[J. H.]

So what was the issue? I cant get Smart Licensing to work on our freshly installed ISE (2.4.0.357).
We've tried both proxy and SCH.