Table Of Contents
Cisco Prime Analytics 1.0 Release Notes
Contents
Introduction
Features and Functions
Using the Bug Toolkit
Related Documentation
Accessibility Features in Prime Analytics 1.0
Obtaining Documentation and Submitting a Service Request
Cisco Prime Analytics 1.0 Release Notes
July 26, 2013
OL-28759-01
These release notes provide an overview to Cisco Prime Analytics 1.0 and help you understand the product at a high level.
Note 
You can access the most current Prime Analytics documentation, including these release notes, online at http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps11715/tsd_products_support_series_home.html.
Contents
These release notes contain the following sections:
•Introduction
•Features and Functions
•Using the Bug Toolkit
•Related Documentation
•Obtaining Documentation and Submitting a Service Request
Introduction
Network managers today want to maximize the value of the massive amounts of information available within their network traffic. However, the many different data types and formats coming from diverse source systems creates challenges for data management, consistency and integrity. Data is created at faster and faster speeds; petabytes of data traversing the network every hour of every day. In this environment, data correlation and analytics require high performance processing because organizations must ensure they capture the exact data they need for organizational decision making and system performance.
The big data movement has value to multiple organizations within a service provider or enterprise: marketing and sales for revenue-generating use cases; network management for root-cause analysis and fault prediction; security for fraud detection; and more. Data value increases when it can be used proactively, in real time, to drive actionable events for modern business processes (for example, policy management).
Cisco Prime Analytics provides the framework to facilitate such use cases. It is a scalable, real-time analytics platform that adapts to different customer environments and use cases. This solution provides real-time insight into network traffic, to improve operating efficiency, facilitate root-cause analysis and fault prediction, and more. And it helps you use your network infrastructure to support your organization's connected business and create new revenue streams.
Features and Functions
Cisco Prime Analytics is a network-centric analytics platform that provides real-time data analysis to support actionable events and dynamic dashboards. It offers the framework and interfaces to facilitate use-case development for many business and network management functions in multiple industries.
Cisco Prime Analytics provides streaming query processing, which supports continuous monitoring of live data, instantaneous query processing, real-time analysis and action, and efficient use of compute resources. It also offers:
•High-performance, real-time analytics with high scalability and low latency.
•Best-in-class collection, with network-ready adapters and interfaces to multiple multivendor data sources.
•Customizable live dashboards that allow you to look at data your way, as well as historical data report generation.
•Reliability achieved through high availability, failover, and online backup and restore.
•Many deployment architectures, delivering horizontal scale and localized data processing.
Table 1 provides a detailed list of Cisco Prime Analytics features and functions.
Table 1 Cisco Prime Analytics Features and Functions
Area
|
Feature
|
Big Data Support
|
Support for high data volume.
|
Cisco Prime Analytics accepts terabytes of daily traffic and can be integrated with modern data archives to support full big data environments.
|
Support for high data variety.
|
Cisco Prime Analytics accepts structured and unstructured data, batch data, static data, and data in motion to support full big data environments.
|
Support for high and variable data velocity
|
Cisco Prime Analytics accepts real-time, changing network data to support full big data environments.
|
Support for late-arriving data.
|
In any real-time or stream processing system, the process to handle late arriving data and out of order data can be problematic. Cisco Prime Analytics provides a seamless capability to automatically update results for both late arriving and out of order data.
|
Data Collection
|
Steaming data collector library.
|
Cisco Prime Analytics facilitates collection of data:
•Across as wide variety of types of networks, including IP next-generation networks (NGNs), mobile, video.
•From many network devices and device elements including routers, switches, data center servers, and more.
•From many network data types including user location, user device IP address, authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA) information, and more.
Cisco has developed a large library of collectors to bring multivendor data into the system, including NetFlow, syslog, and Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) data.
|
Streaming data collector framework.
|
The Cisco Prime Analytics framework allows for easy development of an unlimited variety of collectors, using a configuration file or an XML file or writing simple Java code. This variety accommodates a multitude of network-centered use cases.
|
Integration with existing systems and databases
|
Cisco Prime Analytics supports systems integration with existing business data systems, for example, customer relationship management (CRM), marketing, inventory, financial system, video content libraries, and more. This supports use case and application development that combines real-time and historical data.
|
Data Processing
|
Standards-based data engine that manages raw data and data aggregations.
|
The Cisco Prime Analytics data engine enables continuous analysis of streaming data, including queries that combine those streams with other streaming data or with historical/staged data. Based on industry-standard ANSI SQL technology and best practices, data is continuously processed. These queries allow and provide for the identification of meaningful events within those streams, including detection of complex patterns, event correlation, and abstraction.
|
High performance data processing
|
Prime Analytics provides high speed data processing that enables the timely utilization of big data.
|
Exporting Data
|
Data storage
|
While some Cisco Prime Analytics real-time streaming processing use cases do not require data storage, many do. In those cases, the raw data, the processed data, and the query results can be stored locally or in an external database (RDBMS, Hadoop, and more) for long-term storage and later data processing.
|
Actionable, real-time events
|
With most real-time uses cases, the point of doing things in real-time is often to take action now. When the continuous query engine identifies predefined patterns, an event can be generated and forwarded to another system for action. These events can be user-defined XML. Examples of systems that may consume actionable events generated by the Cisco Prime Analytics engine include:
•A policy server (PCRF) to impact quality of service (QoS), gating, throttling
•A network management system for fault management escalations
•A location based mobile ad insertion
|
Dashboards
|
Live, real-time dashboards
|
Create graphical representations of the data using multiple available formats such as pie charts, bar charts, histograms, geography, and more, that combine different kinds of related data from multiple sources.
Dynamically updating dashboards enhance the situation awareness of decision makers, allowing people to make better decisions and react immediately to changing conditions.
|
Historical dashboards
|
Dashboards can be created using historical data for deeper problem and trend analysis.
|
Customization
|
Customization allows you to look at the data your way to meet your business needs.
|
Reporting
|
Report builder
|
Self-service report creation allows for easy selection of data, the ability to sort, filter, and group data, and generation of reports from a web browser. Prepackaged sample reports are provided.
This augments the graphical dash boarding capabilities of the product for cases where tabular data is preferred.
|
Online analytic processing (OLAP) reports
|
Support for OLAP reports provides advanced reporting, including customizable drill downs and parameters to slice and dice the data.
|
Reporting Administration
|
Publishing flexibility and exports
|
Cisco Prime Analytics reporting options provide flexibility to meet users' unique business needs. This includes export to various standard formats including PDF, CSV, and XLS to satisfy the requirements of various users, departments, and applications.
Reports also can be published by email or on a local server to provide a variety of options and security levels.
|
Customizable reports
|
|
Drag-and-drop report creation
|
Drag-and-drop reports help nontechnical business users to create reports easily. With ad hoc reporting, power users can dynamically select data sources for report generation.
|
Reliability
|
High availability and failover for all components
|
Cisco Prime Analytics is integrated with Red Hat Cluster Suite, providing high reliability.
|
Online backup and restore
|
Cisco Prime Analytics provides for the ability to do backup and restore without system interruption.
|
Security Controls
|
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)/Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol support
|
Cisco Prime Analytics provides SSL/TLS database connections for secure authentication and data transmission.
|
Integration and customization/ application building
|
Cisco Prime Analytics can be customized and integrated with outside applications.
|
Open APIs and standard tools for customers and third parties to develop custom applications
|
Cisco Prime Analytics is an open, standards-based data management and data processing platform. Developers can use standard tools and APIs like SQL, XML, Java, and more to develop use cases, applications, and system integrations.
|
Cisco® or partner services for use case development
|
No two service providers or enterprises have identical analytics needs:
•Markets are different
•Data sources are different
•Customers are different
•Networks are different
Joint analysis (with Cisco or our analytics partners) is required to understand data sources, markets, and needs, and quantitative analysis is needed to determine models.
|
For detailed information on Cisco Prime Analytics features, see the Cisco Prime Analytics 1.0 User Guide.
For information on prerequisites, system requirements, and installation, see the Cisco Prime Performance Manager 1.0 Quick Start Guide
Using the Bug Toolkit
This section explains how to use the Bug Toolkit to search for a specific bug or to search for all bugs in a Prime Analytics release.
To use the Bug Toolkit:
Step 1 Go to http://tools.cisco.com/Support/BugToolKit.
Step 2 At the Log In screen, enter your registered Cisco.com username and password; then, click Log In. The Bug Toolkit page opens.
Note If you do not have a Cisco.com username and password, you can register for them at http://tools.cisco.com/RPF/register/register.do.
Step 3 To search for a specific bug, click the Search Bugs tab, enter the bug ID in the Search for Bug ID field, and click Go.
Step 4 To search for bugs in the current release, click the Search Bugs tab and specify the following criteria:
•Select Product Category—Cloud and Systems Management.
•Select Products—Cisco Prime Analytics.
•Software Version—1.0.
•Search for Keyword(s)—Separate search phrases with boolean expressions (AND, NOT, OR) to search within the bug title and details.
•Advanced Options—You can either perform a search using the default search criteria or define custom criteria for an advanced search. To customize the advanced search, click Use custom settings for severity, status, and others and specify the following information:
–Severity—Choose the severity level.
–Status—Choose Terminated, Open, or Fixed.
Choose Terminated to view terminated bugs. To filter terminated bugs, uncheck the Terminated check box and select the appropriate suboption (Closed, Junked, or Unreproducible) that appears below the Terminated check box. Select multiple options as required.
Choose Open to view all open bugs. To filter the open bugs, uncheck the Open check box and select the appropriate suboptions that appear below the Open check box. For example, if you want to view only new bugs in Prime Optical 9.5, choose only New.
Choose Fixed to view fixed bugs. To filter fixed bugs, uncheck the Fixed check box and select the appropriate suboption (Resolved or Verified) that appears below the Fixed check box.
–Advanced—Check the Show only bugs containing bug details check box to view only those bugs that contain detailed information, such as symptoms and workarounds.
–Modified Date—Choose this option to filter bugs based on the date when the bugs were last modified.
–Results Displayed Per Page—Specify the number of bugs to display per page.
Step 5 Click Search. The Bug Toolkit displays the list of bugs based on the specified search criteria.
Step 6 To export the results to a spreadsheet:
a. In the Search Bugs tab, click Export All to Spreadsheet.
b. Specify the filename and location at which to save the spreadsheet.
c. Click Save. All bugs retrieved by the search are exported.
If you cannot export the spreadsheet, log into the Technical Support website at http://www.cisco.com/cisco/web/support/index.html or contact the Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC).
Related Documentation
You can access the following Cisco Prime Analytics guides on the Cisco Prime Analytics page on Cisco.com:
•Cisco Prime Analytics 1.0 User Guide
•Cisco Prime Analytics 1.0 Release Notes (this document)
•Cisco Prime Analytics 1.0 Quick Start Guide
•Open Source Used in Cisco Prime Analytics 1.0
•Cisco Prime Analytics 1.0 Documentation Overview
The Prime Analytics data sheet can be found at http://www.cisco.com/go/analytics.
Note We sometimes update the documentation after original publication. Therefore, you should review the documentation on Cisco.com for any updates.
Accessibility Features in Prime Analytics 1.0
The Prime Analytics 1.0 software does not provide any accessibility features. All product documents are accessible except for images, graphics, and some charts. If you would like to receive the product documentation in audio format, braille, or large print, contact accessibility@cisco.com.
Obtaining Documentation and Submitting a Service Request
For information on obtaining documentation, submitting a service request, and gathering additional information, see the monthly What's New in Cisco Product Documentation, which also lists all new and revised Cisco technical documentation, at:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/general/whatsnew/whatsnew.html
Subscribe to the What's New in Cisco Product Documentation as a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed and set content to be delivered directly to your desktop using a reader application. The RSS feeds are a free service and Cisco currently supports RSS Version 2.0.
This document is to be used in conjunction with the documents listed in the "Related Documentation" section.
Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. To view a list of Cisco trademarks, go to this URL: www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company. (1110R)
Any Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and phone numbers used in this document are not intended to be actual addresses and phone numbers. Any examples, command display output, network topology diagrams, and other figures included in the document are shown for illustrative purposes only. Any use of actual IP addresses or phone numbers in illustrative content is unintentional and coincidental.
© 2013 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.
Feedback
