Cisco SMARTnet:
An Essential Guide
Cisco® SMARTnet® Service is an award-winning technical support service that gives your IT staff direct, any time access to Cisco experts and extensive Cisco.com resources. Cisco SMARTnet is essential to keeping your business functions available, secure, and operating at peak performance.
How Does Cisco SMARTnet Help Solve your Problems?
As your network and data center evolve and you addnew business processes, systems, and services, the consequences and costs of downtime increase dramatically, and delays in resolving issues can bring your business operations to a stand still. In addition, technology changes rapidly, and keeping your IT staff up to date on the latest advances and security issues can be challenging. Cisco SMARTnet can help you:
• Quickly resolve issues:
Identify and resolve problems quickly before they significantly affect business continuity.
• Empower your IT staff:
Improve operational efficiency by keeping your IT staff up to date on the latest technology advances and security threats.
• Mitigate risk:
Detect security issues that could negatively affect the availability, performance, and reliability of your network.
Cisco SMARTnet Service Features
Cisco SMARTnet gives you access to a wealth of Cisco support tools and expertise, providing you with greater IT infrastructure and network availability and performance while reducing operating costs. Cisco SMARTnet Service provides:
• Fast support from experts:
Connect directly to the Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC), staffed by thousands of certified Cisco professionals with experience diagnosing the toughest problems in your network and data center.
• Online self-help support:
Access extensive support resources 24 hours a day, 365 days a year through Cisco’s online knowledge base, communities, resources, and tools.
• Smart, proactive diagnostics:
Gain critical insight with the embedded Cisco Smart Call Home feature, which offers detailed diagnostics and immediate alerts onenabled devices.
• Ongoing operating system updates: Access new OS features, including both minor and major OS releases,with the latest operating system software updates within your licensed feature set.
Step 1:
Choose your Hardware SLA
If your Cisco network is mission critical, we would always suggest using Cisco support services as only they can provide the required software and security updates needed. This also provides access to Cisco experts (TAC), access to online resources and entitlement to Cisco installed base insights through smart capabilities.
| SLA | DESCRIPTION | |
|---|---|---|
| 8X5XNBD | 8hrs a day, 5 days a week, next business day response time | |
| 8X5XNBD OS | 8 hrs a day, 5 days a week, next business day response time with onsite engineer | |
| 24X7X4 | 24hrs a day, 7 days a week, 4 hr response time | |
| 24X7X4 OS | 24hrs a day, 7 days a week, 4 hr response time with onsite engineer | |
| 24X7X2 | 24hrs a day, 7 days a week, 2hr response time | |
| 24X7X2 OS | 24hrs a day, 7 days a week, 2 hr response time with onsite engineer | |
| 8x7xNCD | 8hrs a day, 7 days a week, next calendar day response time | |
| 8X7XNCD OS | 8hrs a day, 7 days a week, next calendar day response time with onsite engineer | |
| SWSS | Licence/software support |
Step 2:
Choose your Cisco Service Level Tier
This Service Description is part of the Services Agreement (as defined in the Services Guide) and describes
various Services that Cisco will provide to You.
Cisco Support offers three tiers:
Cisco Support - Basic
Cisco Support – Standard
Cisco Support – Signature
Severity levels of Cisco service requests:
To make sure your request is prioritized correctly, Cisco has established service request severity definitions. When you contact the Technical Assistance Center (TAC), you will be asked to assign your request a severity level.
Severity 1 (S1): Critical impact on the customer's business operations. Cisco's hardware, software or as a service product is down.
Severity 2 (S2): Substantial impact on the customer's business operations. Cisco hardware, software or as a service product is degraded.
Severity 3 (S3): Minimal impact on the customer's business operations. Cisco hardware, software or as a service product is partially degraded.
Severity 4 (S4): No impact on the customer's business operations. The customer requests information about features, implementation, or configuration for Cisco's hardware, software, or as a service product.
| TAC Response | Basic | Standard | Signature ≥ $200K Service Term annual spend^ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Severity 1 | 1hr | 30 Minutes | 15 Minutes |
| Severity 2 | 1hr | 30 Minutes | 30 minutes |
| Severity 3 | NBD | 1 Hour | 1 Hour* |
| Severity 4 | NBD | 1 Hour | 1 Hour* |
^If Your Service Term annual spend is less than $200K, then Your Initial Response Time will align to Standard Initial Response Times.
*For Severity 3 and Severity 4 calls received outside of Business Hours, Cisco will respond within the Next Business Day (NBD).
| Capabilities | Features | Basic | Standard | Signature |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| TAC Access | • | • | • | |
| Software Updates and Maintenance Releases | • | • | • | |
| Support Communities | • | • | • | |
| Solution Level Support | • | • | ||
| Trusted Support | Prioritized Case Handling | • | • | |
| Case Expedition, Risk Mitigation, and Resilience | • | |||
| Periodic Service Reviews | • | |||
| Systematic Root Cause Investigation | • | |||
| Asset Management | • | |||
| Hardware RMA | • | • | • | |
| Automated RMA | • | • | ||
| Trusted Support Hardware | Service Level Agreement (SLA) | • | ||
| Predictive Analysis and Prevention | • | |||
| Continuous Optimization | • | |||
| Smart Account Guidance | • | • | ||
| Trusted Support Software | Setup Configuration Support | • | • | |
| Health, Updates, and Change Support | • | |||
| Asset Inventory | • | • | • | |
| End of Life Reports | • | • | • | |
| Assets Digital Capabilities | Asset Growth Report | • | • | |
| Asset Inventory Insights | • | • | ||
| End of Life Insights | • | • | ||
| Asset Criticality Insights | • | • | ||
| Security Advisories Reports | • | • | • | |
| Field Notices Reports | • | • | • | |
| Security Advisories Insights | • | • | ||
| Field Notices Insights | • | • | ||
| Security Hardening Insights | • | • | ||
| Assessments Digital Capabilities | Configuration Insights | • | • | |
| Certificate Expiration | • | • | ||
| Quantum-Safe Infrastructure | • | • | ||
| Software Release Conformance | • | • | ||
| Security Hardening Recommendations | • | |||
| Configuration Recommendations | • | |||
| Case Management | • | • | • | |
| Support Digital Capabilities | Self-service Troubleshooting | • | • | • |
| Case Insights | • | • | ||
| Service Review Reports | • | |||
| Cisco Support Learning Paths | • | • | ||
| Contextual Learning | Remote Practice Labs | • | ||
| Certification Practice Exams | • | |||
| Certification Prep Training | • |
Co-terming/consolidating multiple contracts into one easy to manage contract.
Coterming multiple Cisco SmartNet contracts is a strategic way to simplify renewals, eliminate scattered end dates, and create a cleaner, more predictable support lifecycle for your Cisco estate. It’s especially valuable for organizations managing dozens or hundreds of devices across different sites, where contracts often expire at different times and carry inconsistent service levels.
Cotermination aligns all selected SmartNet services to a single, unified end date, reducing administrative overhead and improving budgeting clarity.
Cotermination works by adjusting the service terms of individual SmartNet lines so they all share the same renewal date. Cisco’s quoting tools allow partners to change end dates directly during the quoting process, automatically recalculating pricing based on the new term length.
This means you can take a mix of contracts—some with months left, some nearly expired—and align them to a single future date. The system prorates coverage so you only pay for the time needed to bring each device into alignment. For organizations with fragmented contract histories, this creates a far more manageable support structure.
Step 3:
Consider 3rd Party Support
Budgets being squeezed or network devices End-of-Support by Cisco?
Network Warehouse offer 3rd party support services to help customers stretch that budget even further. At a fraction of the cost of Cisco SmartNET it is the ideal solution for non-mission critical or EOS devices on your network.
Want the best of both worlds?
Network Warehouse can offer ‘blended’ support which is essentially a mix of Cisco SmartNET support and our own 3rd party support. It is worth noting however that 3rd party support does not offer Cisco TAC access and you will not be able to receive Cisco software and security updates.
It is purely a hardware break fix service which again, is ideal for those non critical or end of support devices that do not have updates available anyhow.
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