Cisco Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance 11.5 White Paper

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At-a-glance health dashboards with built in root-cause identification best practices: The Advanced

offer provides at-a-glance dashboards under the Home menu. These dashboards offer key metrics that

users need to know to keep tabs on the entire collaboration network. For example the End User Impact

dashboard provides information that helps the administrator identify top-N locations where endpoints in the

network are experiencing the most outages, call failures, or service quality issues. Based on the information

provided, the operator can focus troubleshooting on the most affected areas. Using integrated best

practices for troubleshooting, the system also allows intuitive navigation to details that help the operator

understand the frequency of the problem as well as identify the associated node (gateway or switch) that

may be causing the problem.

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Audio call quality monitoring and reports: The Advanced offer uses call detail record (CDR) and call

management record (CMR) information from Cisco Unified Communications Manager to analyze the quality

of every call. The system dashboards display the locations most affected by quality degradation. The

solution categorizes affected calls into simple categories, such as Poor, Acceptable, and Good. It also

provides reports that show information about every call, including detailed quality information.

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Video session monitoring: Using video session diagnostics, an administrator can effectively identify

sessions with degraded services. Administrators can also analyze video call service degradation issues

using video call QoS metrics from Cisco Unified Communications Manager CDRs.

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Infrastructure synthetic tests: The Advanced offer provides synthetic tests to help detect key issues

before they affect end users. Using synthetic tests, network users can test key features of the Cisco Unified

Communications Manager and voicemail system. Endpoint reachability and end-to-end connectivity tests

help determine phone availability and operational status. WAN performance tests on routers test the

performance parameters of WAN connections, for IP service-level agreements (SLAs).

The infrastructure tests can be scheduled to accommodate business needs. Any failed test will generate

alerts on the dashboard, and the administrator will be able to take action to troubleshoot and fix the problem

before end users experience service issues.

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Video precall synthetic test: This feature is useful in situations where users need visibility into any

potential issues before the video calls happen

—for example, before a session for corporate executives. The

video precall function enables users to make a video test call to help ensure the quality of the session

before an actual end user makes the call. The solution monitors the test call just as it would an actual call

and provides deep session information in diagnostics. The session information or fault information can help

users detect any issues on the call path in time to troubleshoot and address any problems before key end

users experience issues during an actual call.

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Event correlation: The event correlation engine helps reduce the clutter of events and alerts on

dashboards. Users can easily see key alerts and events on the alarm browser and can take action to fix

them, improving MTTR. Event correlation offers built-in rules to correlate data and generate aggregated

alerts.

Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance offers three kinds of correlation rules: time-based correlation,

threshold-based correlation, and root-cause correlation.

Time-based correlation helps users treat an event as a problem that needs troubleshooting if and only if it

occurs frequently within a particular time window. For example, an administrator may not want an alert on

an occasional call admission control (CAC) location that is out of bandwidth. However, if a CAC location

goes out of bandwidth three times within 20 minutes, the administrator may expect a critical alert, as this

clearly indicates a bandwidth shortage for that location.