Белая книга для Cisco Cisco Prime Assurance Manager 1.1

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Closing The Loop for Effective Network Operations Management:

Cisco Prime Assurance Manager

features of  other Prime products, such as Prime NCS or Prime LMS.  Further, the user interface must
adhere to the task-oriented Design/Deploy/Operate structure introduced with earlier Prime portfolio
products.  In the case of  Prime Assurance Manager, the vast majority of  features fall into the “Operate”
realm. More to this latter point, Prime Assurance Manager leverages exactly the same approach for
work efficiency as other Prime products, such as templates for applying common monitoring profiles
and Flexible NetFlow definitions, as well as site and group definitions for logical collections of  devices
and systems under management.

Leveraging Intelligent Instrumentation

With these guidelines in place, the core objective of  Prime Assurance Manager could be fully addressed.
As the old saying goes, you can’t manage what you can’t measure. Cisco Prime Assurance Manager is
the first Cisco product designed to enable management of  live production operations by collecting
together measurements across the full, vast array of  intelligent, embedded instrumentation available
within advanced Cisco Systems networks. Following are the key sources of  data that Prime Assurance
Manager leverages:

• Medianet – This family of IOS features for video traffic monitoring and management includes

both Performance Monitor (Perf-mon), which can be used to gather quality and activity metrics
and export them to management systems via NetFlow V9 or SNMP, and Mediatrace, a diagnostic
feature that can be invoked for troubleshooting performance issues and incidents.

• NetFlow/NBAR – Another IOS feature, NetFlow is a de facto industry standard for capturing

performance and usage information regarding application and service activity on the network.
NBAR (Network-Based Application Recognition) complements NetFlow by leveraging deep packet
inspection to more granularly recognize and define application instances and types. Cisco Prime
Assurance Manager taps into this data either directly or via the Cisco Prime NAM. Importantly,
Cisco Prime Assurance Manager supports and facilities the use of flexible data templates available
with the latest version of NetFlow, known as Flexible NetFlow (FNF).

• SNMP – Long the staple of network management, Simple Network Management Protocol, or

SNMP, is used to harvest health and utilization metrics from network nodes as well as provide as
standard means for devices to send notifications to management systems asynchronously, in the
form of “traps.” In the case of Prime Assurance Manager, SNMP is used to gather performance
metrics across a wide range of standard and Cisco-specific MIBs (Management Information
Bases), as well as for key feature sets such as NBAR. Cisco Prime Assurance Manager supports
SNMP v2c and v3.

• Packet analysis – Perhaps the most precise source of visibility in the network, particularly for

deep troubleshooting of difficult issues and 100% accurate identification of applications, comes
from direct inspection of network packets. Within the Cisco Prime portfolio, these capabilities
are provided by the Cisco Prime NAM; however, data from the NAM can also be harvested for
presentation and analysis within Cisco Prime Assurance Manager.

• Cisco Performance Agent (PA) – This IOS feature is available on Cisco routing platforms, and uses

a combination of technologies, such as NBAR and packet inspection, to collect and export traffic
statistics, performance analytics, and WAN optimization metrics using NetFlow V9 format. Cisco
Prime Assurance Manager accesses data coming from Performance Agents via the Cisco NAM.