Web Services Management Agent

Cisco WSMA stands for Web Services Management Agent
WSMA Overview
WSMA is a technology included in IOS operating system (and some other Cisco Operating Systems such as IOS-XE) that facilitates programmatic management of embedded devices. Using industry standard Web Services based on SOAP, NMS developers can provision, configure, manage and adapt the behavior of a device. WSMA web service request & response payloads are encoded in XML. WSMA Web Services provide secure, reliable and robust access to IOS and standard Web Service tools and framework can be used to implement WSMA client applications.
Cisco Embedded Management Family
WSMA is a member of a family of embedded management technologies in Cisco IOS including SNMP, NetFlow, IP SLAs, Embedded event, Syslog, ESM (Embedded Syslog Manager), ERM (Embedded Resource Manager), EMM (Embedded Menu Manager), Tcl and Service Diagnostics.
WSMA Details
WSMA defines a web service infrastructure and a set of web services through which a network device can be managed in the areas of deployment, configuration/provisioning and on-going monitoring and troubleshooting. Currently, the following four web services are exposed, but WSMA’s framework allows for additional web services to be delivered later.
* Configuration service
* Exec service
* Filesystem service
* Notification service
For details of each of the web service, please refer to WSMA Web Services Details
WSMA supports the following transport protocols
* HTTP & HTTPs
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WSMA supports two important modes of communication, listener and initiator modes.
* Listener Mode: The WSMA listens for inbound Web Service session requests in a traditional Web Services client/server architecture.
* Initiator Mode: The WSMA agent can establish an outbound session to the external NMS system to avoid opening up inbound connections to the router or switch. Initiator mode will help in deployment scenarios where the devices are in a NAT environment or behind the firewall and in Zero Touch Deployment models where the device needs to initiate connection to external servers.
WSMA vs Telnet
WSMA provides the following advantages when compared to traditional ways (telnet based, SNMP based) of network management.
* Increased Provisioning/Configuration Speed - Making configuration changes through WSMA, configurations can be applied many times faster than using off-box expect scripts or manual configuration using SSH/Telnet. In addition, multiple CLI commands can be operated as an atomic operation.
* Reduced Development Effort - WSMA frees up Web Services developers to use their existing Web Services tools and expertise to rapidly build management application. Based on industry standard Web Services protocols (SOAP 1.1, SOAP 1.2, etc.) and transports (SSH, TLS and HTTPs) developers can rapidly build applications which are reusable and flexible.
* Improved Automation - In addition to return codes and audit trails, WSMA provides atomic rollback in case of failure. Should the worst occur, WSMA will return the configuration to a working state.
* Improved Accuracy - WSMA brings the benefits of XML and Web Services; accuracy and consistency. Using WSMA to provision, configure, manage and adapt a Cisco device, customers get a robust, self-describing system with the accuracy of XML access.

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