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DATA SHEET
Cisco® Network Connectivity Center (NCC) Application Services Manager (ASM) automatically correlates the behavior of applications with the behavior of related networks, systems, and services. It works with existing application-monitoring tools to proactively identify root-cause problems anywhere in the environment and calculates their impact on service quality.
PRODUCT OVERVIEW
Companies depend on their complex, custom-built business solutions and packaged enterprise applications such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and SCM to run their businesses. For all organizations, sustaining business-critical application services is a top priority-when application services falter, impact on productivity and revenue can be dramatic. To keep their businesses running smoothly and to avoid unplanned downtime, enterprises and service providers need to instantly pinpoint the root cause of performance problems and quickly take the right actions to restore service.
Cisco NCC ASM meets this requirement. By correlating application health with the health of the underlying IT infrastructure, Cisco NCC ASM allows users to immediately pinpoint the root cause of a problem affecting an application service and understand its impact on service quality. This automated cross-domain correlation dramatically increases application availability and performance while significantly reducing costs. Figure 1 shows Cisco NCC ASM root-cause analysis in action.
Figure 1. Cisco NCC Application Services Manager Root-Cause Analysis - Application Map
Figure 2. Cisco NCC Application Services Manager Root-Cause Analysis - Infrastructure Map
In this example, important applications and their users are experiencing problems. The root cause of these problems is a switch failure. By isolating the root cause, Cisco NCC ASM facilitates rapid restoration of service.
IMPORTANT FEATURES AND BENEFITS
Many organizations use application-monitoring tools to gain visibility into the health of their individual applications. These products monitor only a single domain, such as the database, the server, or the network. Without correlation and analysis of events, system administrators are challenged to understand which events are real problems requiring them to take action. To achieve greater visibility, most monitoring products require significant and ongoing time and resource investment to create scripts, filters, and rules to control the floods of alerts that are sent to application administrators. Cisco NCC ASM addresses these issues in a number of ways.
Automated Discovery and Modeling
Cisco NCC ASM discovers applications and provides multiple facilities to create accurate topologies-both automatically and via importation-that represent the application services that are being delivered and their relationships to other applications, hosts, and network connections as well as business elements such as service offerings and clients. These facilities include Extensible Markup Language (XML), ASCII files, adapters to other application or asset-management tools, and a GUI-based topology builder.
Cross-Domain Correlation
Like all Cisco NCC solutions, ASM uses a common information model across the entire application environment. This model enables Cisco NCC ASM to integrate and correlate application data with the health of resources in the network, server, and other IT domains for end-to-end analysis of problems affecting application-service delivery.
Intelligent Analysis
Using patented analysis and correlation technology, Cisco NCC ASM proactively and automatically isolates the problems that impact application services wherever they occur across the managed environment. It monitors service performance by using custom and third-party tools as well as importing relevant information from other Cisco NCC applications. Entities monitored include application processes, sessions, transactions, servers, and network elements. The powerful correlation engine in Cisco NCC ASM analyzes this information in the context of how infrastructure components relate to each other.
Automatic Adaptation to Change
Cisco NCC ASM speeds time to value by adjusting automatically to the managed environment at implementation, reducing the need for custom development. It also adapts automatically as the infrastructure changes, minimizing maintenance requirements for low total cost of ownership and exceptional return on investment.
Unification of Management Tools
Cisco NCC ASM integrates with existing systems, using the events and alerts they detect as the symptoms for root-cause analysis. In addition to protecting your management investment, Cisco NCC adds value to these tools, combining them into a unified applications-management solution.
By pinpointing service-affecting problems quickly and accurately, Cisco NCC ASM significantly decreases mean time to repair (MTTR), which in turn reduces unplanned downtime and translates into significant savings for businesses. With Cisco NCC ASM, administrators can spend more time focused on important projects such as deploying new applications or updating existing applications-projects that can directly impact business competitiveness, delivering high-quality service to customers, and generating more revenue.
PRODUCT SPECIFICATIONS
System Requirement
Solaris 2.8, 2.9, Windows 2000, Windows XP (console only)
Software Requirement
Cisco NCC Network Connectivity Monitor
SERVICE AND SUPPORT
Cisco Systems® offers a wide range of services programs to accelerate customer success. These innovative services programs are delivered through a unique combination of people, processes, tools, and partners, resulting in high levels of customer satisfaction. Cisco services help you to protect your network investment, optimize network operations, and prepare the network for new applications to extend network intelligence and the power of your business. For more information about Cisco services, see Cisco Technical Support Services or Cisco Advanced Services.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
For more information about the Cisco NCC ASM, visit http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps5934/index.html or contact your local account representative or cs-cncc@external.cisco.com .
