Cisco Cisco Prime Assurance Manager 1.1 Libro blanco

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Closing The Loop for Effective Network Operations Management:  
Cisco Prime Assurance Manager 
•  Cisco Application Visibility & Control (AVC) – This is an integrated set of  IOS features supported 
by the Cisco ASR and ISR platforms which uses deep packet inspection to recognize applications 
(NBAR2) and couples that together with PA (for response time) and modular QoS controls to 
deliver a model-based performance optimization capability. Cisco Prime Assurance Manager 
collects data from AVC via Flexible NetFlow and/or the Cisco Prime NAM.
•  WAAS/WAE Flow Agents – WAN optimization solutions from Cisco Systems include agents for 
sending detailed information on application flows and optimization impact to the Cisco Prime 
NAM, which in turn provides the data to Cisco Prime Assurance Manager for display and analysis 
alongside other application-oriented operational data.
•  Events – asynchronous events coming from the managed infrastructure are the first and foremost 
source of  insights that monitoring systems use to understand operational state and the onset of  
issues and problems. Cisco Prime Assurance Manager gathers events coming in the form of  syslog 
and SNMP traps.
Collectively, these data sources represent a full cross-section of  the monitoring data for assessing 
operational availability and health of  the network, together with essential insights into the applications 
and services that are being delivered. Importantly, Cisco Prime Assurance Manager goes beyond 
simply collecting this data. The solution also enables network managers to easily configure all such 
data sources, whether or not Cisco Prime Infrastructure tools are present, thus removing one of  the 
major obstacles to capturing their value. Further, the solution integrates, normalizes, and correlates 
these datasets, so that their true value is compounded by allowing them to be connected and related, 
revealing insights into the greater whole of  the delivery infrastructure.
Covering the Full Scope of Assurance Functions
One  of   the  greatest  technical  challenges  facing  a  network  monitoring  solution  is  the  efficient 
organization and presentation of  what can often be daunting volumes of  data, particularly in the 
form of  performance metrics and event streams. In the ideal case, all such data is brought together, 
organized, and related in ways that allow easy navigation of  information 
and facilitated analysis as a part of  natural reactive or proactive monitoring 
and troubleshooting workflows. This is very much the case with Cisco 
Prime Assurance Manager, with its overriding focus on making network 
monitoring  smooth  and  efficient.  Cisco  Prime  Assurance  Manager 
includes five major categories of  functions that combine to cover the 
significant  majority  of   monitoring  requirements  for  Cisco  networks. 
Each is described in detail below.
Monitoring dashboards: Most operators using Cisco Prime Assurance Manager will primarily 
interact with the product via the many dashboards. These dashboards cover a wide range of  common 
views into the monitoring data, and are built using modifiable collections of  dashlets to assemble and 
present the most useful information for each type of  monitoring task. Standard dashboards include 
an overview with “Top N” summaries of  current activity, an incident dashboard for alarm monitoring 
and management, a network performance dashboard focused on device activity/health, and a service 
performance dashboard highlighting application performance and quality. Another dashboard focuses 
on applications, including which applications are active, current response times and transactions times, 
top users, and various KPIs (see example below in Figure 1)
Prime Assurance Manager’s 
overriding focus is on 
making network monitoring 
smooth and efficient.