Cisco Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance 11.5 White Paper

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Other examples of time-

based correlation supported by Cisco Prime Collaboration include “Too many high

CPU conditions within a user-configurable

time window,” “Prolonged low memory condition,” “Interface

flapping,” and more.

Threshold-based correlation rules help users focus on an issue only when it violates a particular threshold

level. For example, an administrator may not want an alert on per-phone connectivity or a service quality

issue. However, if a location or device pool is experiencing a large number of phone connectivity or service

quality issues, the administrator does expect a critical alert, as it would likely indicate broken infrastructure,

such as where the Cisco Unified Communications Manager or phones connect to switches.

Root-cause correlation rules help users focus on addressing components or devices causing the issue, as
opposed to symptoms of events. For example, “UCM CodeYellow” is a symptom of the real CPU pegging
alarm that is causing calls to be dropped. Similarly, a large number of “device unresponsive” events from

devices at a remote location would likely be related to an outage of a WAN link connecting to that remote

location.

●

User 360-degree and device 360-degree views: Cisco Prime Collaboration Advanced offers a user 360-

degree view that displays user information (from Active Directory integration) and shows all the endpoints

assigned to an end user. The user 360-degree feature shows service quality events for every endpoint

owned by the end user. This helps the administrator associate the end user and his or her experience with

the collaboration services. Users also can cross-launch tools to troubleshoot service degradation issues.

The device 360-degree view provides complete information about a device or application, along with device

faults and performance metrics information for all components on the device or application. Users can

cross-launch contextual troubleshooting tools from the device 360-degree view.

●

Group customization: Administrators can create custom groups for endpoints and devices. For example,
an administrator can create a group called “New York Ex60 Units” or “Dallas Data Center Devices.” These

custom groups show up in various dashboards; for example, using the alarm browser, the administrator can

select the specific custom group to see a set of alerts corresponding to the group. This feature allows

administrators to organize monitoring to obtain information or alerts for a specific set of devices or

endpoints.

●

Trunk group customization: Administrators can also create a custom group of trunks and monitor their

aggregate utilization percentage

—useful for Cisco Unified Communications Manager Express deployments,

SLA verification, and load balancing.

●

Multicustomer support: Administrators can manage multiple Cisco Unified Communications deployments

with a single instance of Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance Advanced. This includes support for static

Network Address Translation (NAT) and overlapping IP addresses, single and multicustomer filtering, views

and reports, and multilevel RBAC.

●

OSS integration: Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance can be integrated with an external OSS or email

system using the northbound notifications feature. Northbound alarms in SNMP trap and syslog format

allow easy integration with existing OSSs.

Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance: How to Change from Standard to Advanced

The Standard and Advanced features are controlled by the license applied. The Cisco Prime Collaboration

Assurance OVA contains Standard as well as Advanced code, along with the Linux OS. The Assurance OVA also

includes Cisco Prime Collaboration Analytics and Contact Center Assurance (CCA) code. The Advanced

Assurance, Analytics, and CCA features are activated through the purchase of full Advanced licenses, not upgrade

licenses.