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Cisco Spaces

The Cisco Spaces integration lets you use existing Cisco access points as Blecon tag scanners, with no additional hotspot hardware required.

How it works

Cisco access points passively scan Bluetooth advertisements and report them to the Cisco Spaces cloud. The integration receives these sightings — together with the position Cisco Spaces computes for each tag — over a dedicated event stream, and creates spotted and position events that flow through the standard Blecon event pipeline.

Unlike the Juniper Mist integration, positioning is computed by Cisco Spaces using your access point placements on your Cisco floor plans. Blecon ingests the computed position directly, so there is no access point setup on the Blecon side.

Your tags must already be registered in Blecon. The integration only processes scans for known tags; all other Bluetooth traffic is filtered out and never stored.

Requirements

  • Blecon Enterprise plan
  • Cisco Spaces subscription with IoT Services
  • Cisco Spaces: Connector deployed and paired with your wireless controller
  • Wi-Fi 6 Cisco Catalyst access points (9105/9115/9117/9120/9130/9136/916x series) on a Catalyst 9800 controller, release 17.9.6 or later
  • Floor plans in Cisco Spaces — Cisco Spaces requires floor maps for IoT Services to work at all. Maps are imported from Cisco Prime Infrastructure or Catalyst Center, or uploaded as CAD / vectorised PDF files. If you run neither Prime nor Catalyst Center and have no CAD floor plans, contact us before starting — this is a hard Cisco requirement, not a Blecon one.
  • Geo-referenced floor plans — Cisco Spaces can only report GPS coordinates for tags if your floor plans have GPS markers / coordinates configured. Without geo-referencing, tags will show as seen but without map positions.
  • Access points configured as BLE gateways in Scan mode (or Dual mode), and placed on your floor plans so Cisco Spaces can compute positions
  • On the Catalyst 9800 controller: NETCONF enabled on port 830, aaa new-model, aaa authentication login default local and aaa authorization exec default local configured, and NTP synchronised across the controller, connector and access points

Setting up the integration

In Cisco Spaces

  1. Ensure your floor plans are uploaded and processed, and that each access point is placed on its floor in the location hierarchy. Cisco Spaces will not report tag sightings from an access point that is not placed on a floor.
  2. Activate IoT Services for your access points: go to IoT Services > About IoT Services, click Activate IoT Services, choose Wireless, and select your connector and access points. This enables the IoT streams and configures the access points as BLE gateways. Ensure the access points end up in Scan or Dual mode so they detect nearby Bluetooth devices.
  3. In the Cisco Spaces App Center, find the Blecon app and click Activate.
  4. Accept the requested permissions and select the locations to share.
  5. When asked about BLE devices, choose "Select all BLE devices" and leave "Exclude Ungrouped Devices" unchecked — Blecon tags are not managed by Cisco and would be filtered out otherwise.
  6. At the end of activation, Cisco Spaces displays an Activation Key. Copy it. The key is valid for about one hour, and can only be used once — if it expires or you have already used it, re-activate the app in Cisco Spaces to generate a new one.

In Blecon

  1. In your Track workspace, go to Integrations > Cisco Spaces.
  2. Click Add Activation, paste the Activation Key, optionally give the connection a name (for example, the site name), and click Connect.
  3. Blecon verifies the key with Cisco, establishes the event stream, and tag sightings begin flowing automatically. The integration page shows when events were last received.

An account can hold multiple Cisco Spaces connections — one per Cisco Spaces account or site. Each activation key can only be used by one Blecon account.

Positioning

Cisco Spaces computes each tag's position using your access point placements on your Cisco floor plans and reports it with every sighting, including a confidence estimate. Blecon converts this into standard position events — the live map, zones, and alert rules all work exactly as they do with Blecon hotspots.

For map positions, configure GPS markers on your floor plans in Cisco Spaces (geo-referencing). If floor plans are not geo-referenced, Cisco reports only floor-relative coordinates and tags will not appear on the Blecon map.

Removing the integration

In Integrations > Cisco Spaces, click Disconnect next to a connection. Tag sightings from that Cisco Spaces account stop within a minute. Reconnecting requires a new activation key from Cisco Spaces.

Questions? Contact Blecon support — we're happy to help.