Communications failure with Cisco Smart License server
ICSeverity
5 - Notice
Impact
Device will retry later
Description
This error appears if you have Smart Licensing configured on the device. Smart Licensing is a cloud-based unified license management system for managing licenses across Cisco products.
Depending on your network type and setup, there are different methods of communication possible with the CSSM (Cisco Smart Software Manager) portal.
The errors appears while using either CSSM, CSLU, or the On-Prem mode of operations, and indicates a communication issue with the CSSM portal or the On-Prem/CSLU device.
SMART_LIC-3-COMM_FAILED: Communications failure with the Cisco Smart Software Manager (CSSM) : Fail to parse response data from SCH server.
Check the remediation steps and attempt to re-establish communication again
SyslogMessage
SMART_LIC-3-COMM_FAILED
MessageSample
Apr 10 10:10:10 <> %SMART_LIC-3-COMM_FAILED: Communications failure with the Cisco Smart Software Manager (CSSM) : Fail to parse response data from SCH server. THIS IS A SAMPLE MESSAGE
ProductFamily
- Cisco Catalyst 9300 Series Switches
- Cisco Catalyst 9400 Series Switches
- Cisco Catalyst 9500 Series Switches
- Cisco Catalyst 9500H Series Switches
- Cisco Catalyst 9600 Series Switches
- Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers
Regex
N/A
Recommendation
The most frequent cause of this error is an interaction from a Catalyst 9000 series switch or 9800 series wireless controller (running 16.12.x or later code) that is attempting to use an on-prem licensing server that runs software prior to 8-202004.
The combination of these two pieces of software could result in the licensing server returning a message which the switch or WLC could not understand, which in turn generates this problem.
Specifically, the ERM (Endpoint Reporting Model) was not supported on earlier on-prem software and, as a result, this lack of feature parity resulted in unexpected message types which trigger this log.
Starting in 8-202004 for the on-prem server, the behavior was changed to suppress this messaging to prevent the log.
8-202007 (and later) introduced the ability for the server to implement ERM which ultimately addressed the root cause of this issue.
If you see this log, it is strongly recommended to check the on-prem smart licensing server software and if necessary upgrade it to the latest release.
Commands
#show version
#show logging
#show license all
#show license summary
#show call-home profile all
#show tech-support license
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