About Anonymous Reporting
You can help to improve the ASA platform by enabling Anonymous Reporting, which allows Cisco to securely receive minimal error and health information from the device. If you enable the feature, your customer identity will remain anonymous, and no identifying information will be sent.
Enabling Anonymous Reporting creates a trust point and installs a certificate. A CA certificate is required for your ASA to validate the server certificate present on the Smart Call Home web server and to form the HTTPS session so that your ASA can send messages securely. Cisco imports a certificate that is predefined in the software. If you decide to enable Anonymous Reporting, a certificate is installed on the ASA with a hardcoded trust point name: _SmartCallHome_ServerCA. When you enable Anonymous Reporting, this trust point is created, the appropriate certificate is installed, and you receive a message about this action. The certificate then appears in your configuration.
If the appropriate certificate already exists in your configuration when you enable Anonymous Reporting, no trust point is created, and no certificate is installed.
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When you enable Anonymous Reporting, you acknowledge your consent to transfer the specified data to Cisco or to vendors operating on Cisco’s behalf (including countries outside of the U.S.). Cisco maintains the privacy of all customers. For information about Cisco’s treatment of personal information, see the Cisco Privacy Statement at the following URL: http://www.cisco.com/web/siteassets/legal/privacy.html When the ASA configures Smart Call Home anonymous reporting in the background, the ASA automatically creates a trustpoint containing the certificate of the CA that issues the Call Home server certificate. The ASA now supports validation of the certificate if the issuing hierarchy of the server certificate changes, without the need for customer involvement to make certificate hierarchy changes. You can also automatically import the trustpool certificates so that ASA renews the certificate hierarchy without any manual intervention. When you upgrade ASA 9.14(2.14), the trust point configuration automatically changes from CallHome_ServerCA to CallHome_ServerCA2. |
DNS Requirement
A DNS server must be configured correctly for the ASA to reach the Cisco Smart Call Home server and send messages to Cisco. Because it is possible that the ASA resides in a private network and does not have access to the public network, Cisco verifies your DNS configuration and then configures it for you, if necessary, by doing the following:
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Performing a DNS lookup for all DNS servers configured.
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Getting the DNS server from the DHCP server by sending DHCPINFORM messages on the highest security-level interface.
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Using the Cisco DNS servers for lookup.
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Randomly using a static IP addresses for tools.cisco.com.
These tasks are performed without changing the current configuration. (For example, the DNS server that was learned from DHCP will not be added to the configuration.)
If there is no DNS server configured, and the ASA cannot reach the Cisco Smart Call Home Server, Cisco generates a syslog message with the warning severity level for each Smart Call Home message that is sent to remind you to configure DNS correctly.
See the syslog messages guide for information about syslog messages.