Unified Communications Network Management
Depending on the size of your Unified Communications infrastructure, Cisco has developed an integrated suite of products designed to provide a single view into the entire Cisco Unified Communications solution. The suite consists of:
• Cisco Unified Provisioning Manager
• Cisco Unified Operations Manager
• Cisco Unified Service Monitor
• Cisco Unified Service Statistics Manager
Cisco Unified Provisioning Manager
Your organization can significantly decrease the time to provision users for initial deployment, as well as ongoing adds, moves and changes. Cisco Unified Provisioning Manager supports the implementation of Cisco Unified Communications, as well as ongoing simplified operational provisioning and activation services for individual subscriber changes.
Business-Oriented Approach with Workflow Automation: Cisco Unified Provisioning Manager permits standard services to be ordered for subscribers and processes all changes to the underlying CUCM applications as an order. All orders in the system are tracked and viewable, both across orders and by subscriber name or ID. A wizard-driven approach is used for order entry.
Infrastructure Templates: Configuration templates provide the ability to auto configure the Cisco Unified Communications voice infrastructure in a consistent way. Templates can be created to initially configure or reconfigure CUCM components. When pushing a template to a device, users may specify an optional keyword list. The tool also permits the definition of standard configurations that can be used in situation such as rolling out new offices, locations, remote sites, etc.
Batch Provisioning: When deploying a large number of services, batch processing can be utilized and can be scheduled to run at any time. The software permits a single batch to contain multiple types of orders.
Cisco Unified Operations Manager
At the heart of the management suite, Cisco Unified Operations Manager is designed specifically for managing Cisco Unified Communications Solutions. The solution provides comprehensive voice network monitoring with diagnostics for the entire system, including the underlying voice transport infrastructure. Operations Manager identifies the role of every device and application in the UC network and monitors them, detecting operational faults with voice application-aware intelligence. The resulting alerts facilitate rapid troubleshooting of outages, with context-sensitive links to the appropriate services for that device. There are no workflow rules to write, no thresholds to define, and no time-consuming management setup to budget for.
Reduces Downtime with Real-Time Visualization: Operations Manager presents the current operational status of the UC system through dynamic, service-level views of the network showing the current status of monitored devices, applications and phones. You can navigate to views that display detailed information for each element and diagram the relationships to other elements in the solution. Logical entities such as trunk groups and route lists are also fully managed in these views.
Saves Time with Autodiscovery and Actionable Alerts: Operations Manager automatically discovers the network and updates its knowledge base by identifying the role of every device and application in the UC network. It monitors the discovered network elements to detect problems using its built-in intelligence to notify the network operations staff. With highly actionable alerts displayed, operations staff can launch context-sensitive monitoring and diagnostic tools to troubleshoot the problem.
Anticipates Problems with Scheduled Tests on the Network: Operations Manager comes with a powerful set of diagnostic tests that can be executed on demand or through calendar control for proactive network health monitoring and trouble isolation. The diagnostics can be used to validate that the phone's features are set up as expected, including call, call hold, call park, call transfer, message light activation, and conference calling. Operational tests simulate user activities such as getting a dial tone, making phone calls, leaving voicemail, and creating or joining conference calls; the tests also log any issues encountered. Dial-plan tests provide an easy mechanism to validate all the dial plans. Node-to-node testing uses the Cisco IOS® Software IP service-level agreement (SLA) feature in Cisco routers and switches to simulate traffic through the network. After the test, network characteristics such as status, response time, latency, jitter, packet loss, and network quality are recorded in a results report.
Cisco Unified Service Monitor
Part of the Cisco Unified Communications Management Suite, Cisco Unified Service Monitor offers an affordable, reliable way to continuously monitor active calls supported by the Cisco Unified Communications System. Cisco Unified Service Monitor also provides near real-time notification when the voice quality of a call fails to meet a user-defined quality threshold. Cisco Unified Service Monitor monitors, evaluates, and generates reports on user-experience metrics associated with active calls on the Cisco Unified Communications system. It provides a comprehensive list of voice-impairment metrics useful in troubleshooting voice-quality issues.
Voice-Quality Measurements and Alerts: Cisco Unified Service Monitor monitors voice-quality measurements in a voice-over-IP (VoIP) network and produces alerts based on measurements exceeding preset thresholds. Key voice call characteristics such as codec type and characteristics, jitter, and packet loss are collected and reported.
Thresholds: Cisco Unified Service Monitor provides the ability to set thresholds based on device types and codec types, incorporates support for Cisco Unified Communications Manager 7.1, and includes reporting data export. Alerts are sent to upstream applications such as Cisco Unified Operations Manager when a MOS threshold is violated.
Integration with Cisco Unified Operations Manager: Tight integration with Cisco Unified Operations Manager offers the ability to send near real-time alerts via Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) trap, email, paging, and Syslog messages to notify administrators of call quality degradation. Cisco Unified Operations Manager also provides the ability to simulate synthetic voice traffic using the Cisco IOS® Software IP service-level agreement (SLA) feature and to perform path analysis between the devices where the endpoints are connected in order to troubleshoot network issues resulting in user-experience degradation.
Cisco 1040 Sensors, deployed close to the endpoint (IP phone, gateway, or voicemail system), monitor and evaluate call quality and report this information for active calls in near real time. The Cisco 1040 Sensor, can be used during live subscriber calls and during synthetic test calls.
The Cisco Network Analysis Module Family of products offers unparalleled visibility into application and network performance to help ensure consistent and efficient delivery of applications and services to end users. The family includes both integrated service modules and self-contained appliances offering deployment flexibility essential for managing application performance and improving operational manageability of the underlying network.
Cisco Unified Service Statistics Manager
Cisco Unified Service Statistics Manager provides advanced statistics analysis and reporting capabilities for Cisco Unified Communications deployments. It is an easy-to-use, web-based software product that features a variety of advanced reports for executive, operations, and capacity-planning functions. Cisco Unified Service Statistics Manager provides many predefined and customizable reports that provide visibility into critical metrics, including call volume, service availability, call quality, resource utilization, and capacity across the Cisco Unified Communications system, including across multiple Cisco Unified Communications Manager clusters, gateways, and related devices. It helps enable users to view information based on network, service, business, and user criteria. Users can define service-level agreement (SLA) constructs as well as measure and verify them based on collected unified communications statistics. Customizable report templates and automatic report invocation and scheduling provide users with a great deal of power and flexibility.
Cisco Unified Workspace Licensing
Cisco Unified Workspace Licensing (CUWL) is an easy to use, affordable program that packages client and server software, licensing, service and support and software subscription. CUWL provides the opportunity to give the full suite of Cisco Unified Communications applications to all users in the organization. CUWL reduces the total cost of ownership through a consistent per-user price point and offers workspace applications at a more affordable initial cost of acquisition.
Cisco Unified Workspace Licensing is available in four versions:
- Business Edition: Built on the CUCM-Business Edition platform, this edition includes call control, voice messaging, unified clients, mobility and presence in a package optimized for 50 to 500 users.
- Entry Edition: This edition provides basic dial tone and mobility features.
- Standard Edition: Built on the CUCM platform, this edition includes call control, voice messaging, unified clients, mobility, and presence.
- Professional Edition: This edition offers all the features in Standard Edition, plus additional applications including mobile communicator client, audio, video and web conferencing, contact center capabilities and other advanced features.
Cisco Unified Communications Software Subscription
Cisco offers a comprehensive and smart way to maximize your investment in Cisco Unified Communications by offering software subscriptions, service, and support. The combination of Cisco Unified Communications Software Subscription and Cisco Unified Communications Essential Operate Service (part of the SMARTnet family) allows you to get the latest major, minor, and maintenance updates for Cisco software releases, as well as giving you access to online tools and resources that can help you solve problems quickly. Cisco simplifies everything about keeping your Cisco Unified Communications System current with the latest product enhancements and functions for IP telephony, conferencing, messaging, presence, mobility, and contact centers.
Cisco Unified Communications Software Subscription increases business value by providing an economical and timely approach to upgrading to new Cisco technology, thereby optimizing return on investment (ROI) and reducing total cost of ownership (TCO) for Cisco Unified Communications Solutions. During the Cisco Unified Communications Software Subscription term, which can be 1, 2, 3, or 5 years, you can order major release software upgrades at no additional charge. Minor and maintenance release updates are a part of Cisco Unified Communications Essential Operate Service.