Deliver superior end-user quality of experience and lower operating expenses with simplified, unified management across voice and video collaboration networks.
Enterprise networks are undergoing continuous transformation as organizations invest in next-generation collaboration technologies with integrated voice and video deployments. IT departments must be empowered to effectively manage this transformation and the lifecycle of these networks, services, endpoints, and collaboration architectures. They also must meet demands from end users for anywhere, anytime network access with consistent high quality of service. At the same time, these organizations are under increasing pressure to reduce operating expenses and optimize limited resources.
Traditional siloed, nonintegrated management tools have made it difficult for collaboration network operators to quickly and effectively troubleshoot issues, provision new users, or perform changes. The result is collaboration netwok management operations that are complex, manual, error prone, and inefficient.
Cisco Prime™ Collaboration addresses these challenges by providing simplified, unified management for voice and video networks. The solution helps ensure a superior end-user quality of experience, lowers operating expenses, and allows enterprises to extract the full value from their unified communications and collaboration technology investment.
Cisco Prime Collaboration Overview
Cisco Prime Collaboration removes management complexity and provides automated, accelerated provisioning, real-time monitoring, proactive troubleshooting, and long-term trending and analytics in one integrated product. The solution delivers a premier operations experience through an intuitive user interface and optimized operator methodology, including automated workflows that ease implementation and ongoing administration.
Provisioning
Provisioning features include automated processes for Cisco® Unified Communications and Cisco TelePresence® 1 initial deployments and for "day-2" moves, adds, changes, and deletions (MACDs). An intuitive user interface provides a single view of a subscriber and the subscriber's services (see Figure 1) as well as a consolidated view of subscribers across the organization. With these capabilities, Cisco Prime Collaboration significantly accelerates site rollouts and dramatically reduces the time required for ongoing changes, resulting in exceptional productivity gains and lower operating expenses. In addition, by significantly simplifying moves, adds, and changes, the solution facilitates delegation of these tasks - allowing organizations to optimize IT resources and further reduce total cost of ownership.
Figure 1. User/Subscriber Services View
Assurance
Cisco Prime Collaboration provides efficient, integrated service assurance management through a single, consolidated view of the Cisco voice and video collaboration environment. This includes continuous, real-time monitoring and advanced troubleshooting tools for Cisco Unified Communications and Cisco TelePresence systems including the underlying transport infrastructures, as seen in Figure 2.
Figure 2. User-Defined Summary View
Cisco Prime Collaboration proactively notifies operators of issues and facilitates speedy resolution of problems through proactive fault detection and rapid isolation using purpose-built diagnostic tools. For video, the solution allows operators to view end-to-end session paths over Cisco and third-party devices, and on Cisco Medianet routers, jitter and packet loss statistics help pinpoint hotspots affecting session quality (see Figures 3 and 4). As a result, Cisco Prime Collaboration expedites operator resolution of service quality issues before affecting end users - for a superior end-user collaborative experience.
Figure 3. Video End-to-End Session Path Trace View
Figure 4. Medianet Path View
Longer Term Trending and Analysis
Using the Analytics module, Cisco Prime Collaboration also provides historical reporting of key performance indicators (KPIs) and helps enable IT network managers to analyze trends for capacity planning, resource optimization, and quality of service. The solution helps track collaboration technology adoption rates in the network and provides metrics to help analyze how users are actually using the collaboration endpoints daily (see Figure 5). It also provides insights into key collaboration network resource usage trends. With one year's worth of historical data, many options to slice and dice the reports, and easy report customization, Cisco Prime Collaboration provides actionable information to IT managers, planners, and executives. This information simplifies the long-term planning process, informs ongoing technology investment decisions, and helps optimize the network configuration to improve end-user quality of experience.
Figure 5. Analytics Technology Adoption View
Features and Benefits
Table 1 gives a summary of the features and benefits of Cisco Prime Collaboration.
Table 1. Cisco Prime Collaboration Features and Benefits Summary
Feature
Benefits
Voice and Video Management on a Single Pane of Glass
Single product with an integrated view of all statistics and alarms
• Simplify management of voice and video and lower costs
• Reduce hardware expense and administration
• Reduce training expenses
Single login for all options with Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) support
Increase operating efficiencies
Cisco Best Practices
Alignment with Cisco collaboration products
Help ensure high network availability and quality of service using monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities that are fine-tuned to Cisco collaboration applications
Day-1 support
Enjoy day-1 support of new Cisco collaboration product releases to help ensure up-to-date coverage with no manageability gaps
IPv6 support
Provision and monitor IPv6 endpoints
Cisco Prime Collaboration Provisioning
Day-1 Voice and Video Provisioning
Single interface for call control, messaging, presence, and video
Accelerate provisioning tasks
Video infrastructure and endpoint provisioning
Promote greater adoption of Cisco TelePresence through large-scale provisioning of Cisco TelePresence infrastructure and Cisco Unified Communications Manager registered endpoints
Configuration templates
• Create consistent overall network implementation by defining standard configurations that can be used in situations such as rolling out new offices, locations, remote sites, or organizational overlays
• Reduce troubleshooting time
Provisioning policy settable at several levels
Provide policy and domain control for administrators handling day-2 provisioning by automating provisioning based on preset policies for services, service areas, and subscriber types
Batch provisioning
Increase operating efficiencies and reduce costs with scheduled scripts and templates for batch provisioning that let an operator rapidly and consistently add or modify a large number of users or a large number of endpoints/device profiles (and the corresponding configuration settings). A single batch can act across an entire unified communications/telepresence network
Day-2 Voice and Video Provisioning
Automated processes
• Greatly reduce the time required to move, add, change, or delete voice users and their services
• Easily delegate MACD tasks for operational efficiencies and savings
• Improve provisioning accuracy
Delegation of MACD tasks
• Allow MACD requests to be met without requiring an underlying knowledge of the voice and video applications
• Assign domain and service areas to administrators and promote greater operational control by making sure that MACD activities are limited to parameters set for each administrator
Batch operations
• Perform mass user additions or changes using a consistent approach for easier system maintenance - including batch operations across multiple unified communications clusters; for example, user service management can be spread across call control and voicemail in the same batch line
• Improve administrator productivity with batch scheduling
End-user policy assignment
Promote greater operational control with policy for services and devices defined by the roles of the user
Operational Tracking for Provisioning
Order tracking
Provide greater operational control by tracking changes made to infrastructure and user services, including order number, operator placing the order, end user, and date and time
Audit trail
Promote accountability and network security and facilitate troubleshooting by tracking login, logout, IP address, time and date, time logged in, and reason for logout (as well as PIN and password changes)
Northbound Interfaces
Web services interface
Ease automation of provisioning workflow and query of service inventory
Northbound provisioning API
Integrate easily with custom applications, web service portals, and human resources systems for automated, consistent service provisioning. An SDK is provided with example code
Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance
Fault Monitoring
At-a-glance and real-time status views of all faults in the collaboration network
Expedite operator resolution of issues
Event correlation that streamlines dependent events into fewer alarms
Reduce alarm clutter
Guided alarm diagnosis using contextual actions
Promote operator efficiency by limiting actions to those appropriate to the selected device
View of third-party events created from any syslog, basic MIB 2 device or Linux/Windows server
Enjoy greater operator flexibility to monitor more device types
Automatic forwarding of alarms as emails (with URL links) to access assurance features directly from the email with device context
Notify operators even when they are not viewing the management system, reducing downtime and helping to ensure that critical alarms are not missed
Automatic forwarding of filtered alarms as traps to other management systems
Integrates the actionable alarms created by the Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance module into other management systems, providing easy integration with existing operational support systems
At-a-Glance Dashboards
Device, endpoint, and user views such as End-user Impact, Collaboration Infrastructure Summary, and TelePresence Endpoint Utilization Summary
• Get at-a-glance consolidated information for devices, applications, and endpoints
• Visualize all endpoints for a user using a single interface
• Quickly determine service experience for all endpoints
Key performance indicator views
• Improve mean time to repair (MTTR) with statistics summary displays that focus the operator on the KPIs for the devices most affected
• Promote proactive troubleshooting and efficient operations with information tailored to each operator's preference
Direct launch into troubleshooting best practices and diagnostic screens
• Reduce key clicks
• Reduce training requirements
Performance Monitoring
Monitoring of collaboration resource usage
Enjoy greater visibility into critical performance metrics of each managed element
Graphical views for side-by-side comparison of selected metrics with "zoom-in" capabilities
Reduce troubleshooting time and effort with statistical charts that overlay multiple KPIs for a device with up to one week's worth of data, allowing the operator to zoom in to any part of the display time frame
Export of tabular content in comma- separated value (CSV) format
Promote further data analysis and collaboration among teams
Quality of Service Monitoring
Mean Opinion Scores (MOSs) that measure and identify jitter, packet loss, and delay that notify operators of impairments in the network
Improve quality of service by isolating quality issues in each device pool and identify site-level problems
Deployment of the Cisco 1040 Sensors or the Cisco Prime Network Analysis Module (NAM) to improve the MOS granularity, sampling and reporting every 60 seconds
Improve quality of service and sample in multiple locations to reduce the time needed to isolate problems
Video quality measurements during sessions and presession simulations
Help ensure that each video session is the highest quality
Diagnostics and Testing
Jitter, packet loss, differentiated services code point (DSCP), and percent utilization information for Cisco IP service-level agreement (IP SLA) and Medianet- equipped Cisco devices
• Quickly and efficiently isolate network impairments in real time with testing and diagnostic features built into Cisco network devices
• Easily identify configuration issues that can reduce quality for voice and video endpoints
Scheduled pretesting of key components and circuits using end-to-end site connectivity tests, unified communications application feature tests, and WAN link performance tests
Assure service readiness and the highest quality end-user experience
Automatic display of technology-specific diagnostic views based on the device selected
Reduce time to isolate problems and training expense with guided troubleshooting workflows and smart-links to the recommended test or measurement display
KPI charts that display, in a single view, the most important information for the device or device grouping
Expedite troubleshooting by reducing the number of key clicks and open windows needed to collect enough information to identify and resolve a problem
Dynamic statistical overlay charts that allow multiple KPI charts to be overlaid, providing a single time reference
Improve diagnostic efficiency with user-selected statistical overlays that align related measurements in time to make it easier to identify cause and effect
Northbound Interface
Northbound alarms in Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) trap format based on Cisco Prime Collaboration MIB
Integrate easily with existing operational support systems, providing the same actionable collaboration alarms and events to another network management system
Short-term Reports (up to 7 Days) for Day-to-Day Operations and Troubleshooting
Complete collaboration inventory of infrastructure and endpoints with serial numbers, firmware versions, locations, and much more
Reduce time spent collecting inventory information by providing flexible reporting from the Cisco Prime Collaboration database
Tracking of patterns with quality history information including call quality measurements and event reports
Improve uptime by reviewing key metrics and event history across the collaboration network in a concise report format
Tracing of Cisco TelePresence usage patterns and resource loading video session utilization
Identify over- or underused endpoints for better capacity planning and to drive efficient usage practices
Provisioning details on the voice users, services, and resource configurations
Quickly generate a services summary to efficiently identify service and asset deployment across the voice part of the collaboration network
Activity details on phone moves and changes
Help manage a large phone deployment by tracking all phone movement in a networkwide report, reducing troubleshooting time and improving overall inventory management
Cisco Prime Collaboration Analytics
Cisco Prime Collaboration Analytics - Long Term Reporting and Analysis
Technology Adoption
Visualize the speed of deployment; track service usage distribution by endpoint model and type; determine voice and video service consumption trends
Asset Usage
Analyze trends for least used endpoints
Traffic Analysis
View statistics on dialed numbers, off net calls, call traffic per location, and traffic type (local, internal, external, and more)
Service Experience
Help ensure high end-user satisfaction by monitoring call failure trends, service quality distribution by location, and most impacted endpoints
Capacity Analysis
Track the Average Bouncing Busy Hour to determine traffic load and detect trunk capacity; analyze CAC bandwidth, conferencing MCUs, and trunk utilization
Cisco Prime Collaboration Standard and Advanced
Cisco Prime Collaboration Standard is included with all Cisco Unified Workspace Licensing and Cisco User Connect Licensing for Cisco Unified Communications, taking the complexity out of provisioning and monitoring your voice and video deployments. For deployments requiring more advanced management capabilities, Cisco Prime Collaboration Advanced offers additional automation, deeper diagnostics, and long-term reporting.
Cisco Prime Collaboration Advanced Licensing and Ordering Information
Cisco Prime Collaboration is a licensed software product that is secured to the MAC of the host server. Licensing is ordered based on the collaboration management options required (Assurance, Provisioning, or Analytics) and the endpoint type (Phone or Cisco TelePresence) and the quantity of those endpoints.
When ordering Cisco Prime Collaboration, the Assurance, Analytics, and Provisioning modules are options, available separately or in bundles. Cisco Prime Collaboration Analytics requires Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance to be installed first since it provides all the raw data to the Analytics module.
Upgrade Information
Cisco Prime Product Assured Software Subscription allows prepayment for major upgrades to Cisco Prime Collaboration 9.5 and 10.0 for 1-, 2-, 3-, or 5-year subscription contracts. It works in conjunction with the Cisco Essential Services (ESW) maintenance plan, whereby ESW provides Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC) support and access to minor updates and patches from the cisco.com software download site.
For system requirements, please refer to the Cisco Prime Collaboration Quick Start Guide.
Using the Cisco lifecycle services approach, Cisco and its partners provide a broad portfolio of end-to-end services and support that can help increase your network's business value and return on investment. This approach defines the minimum set of activities needed, by technology and by network complexity, to help you successfully deploy and operate Cisco technologies and optimize their performance throughout the lifecycle of your network.
