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Data Sheet
Cisco Info Center 3.6 for Real-Time Event
Management for Business and Service Assurance
Managing network events proactively allows service providers and enterprises to maintain the uptime of information technology (IT) based services. Because the network infrastructure has become instrumental to the delivery of business services, resolving IT faults quickly is essential. The Cisco® Info Center suite helps improve business efficiencies. Cisco Info Center provides real-time monitoring, management, and event de-duplication, and helps enterprises and service providers proactively manage their IT infrastructures to help ensure the continuous uptime of business services and applications.
Whether your organization is a member of the Cisco Powered Network Program, or you need to support a multivendor, multitechnology, heterogeneous environment, Cisco Info Center can help ensure the reliability and performance of your underlying infrastructure. Cisco Info Center's breadth of coverage supports more than 1000 unique customer environments including:
About Cisco Info Center
Breadth of coverage, rapid deployment, ease of use, high scalability, and performance are some of the reasons large service providers and enterprises place their trust in Cisco Info Center. It collects, consolidates, and correlates events from more than 1000 unique networking environments in real time, and presents this information in a meaningful, intuitive, visual format so administrators can prevent business processes from being negatively affected by network events.
You can monitor the real-time severity of events through color-coded Cisco Info Center EventLists. In addition, with Cisco Info Center Dashboards, you can customize service views, and manage them with UNIX, Windows NT, and Web-based graphical tools. From mainframes, UNIX systems, and NT systems to circuit and voice switches, IP routers, Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) devices, and management frameworks, Cisco Info Center helps you effectively manage your business infrastructure. Cisco Info Center intelligently reduces alarms, and helps decrease the mean time to resolution of problems with the following key benefits:
- Quickly resolve problems and improve help-desk operations—Cisco Info Center enables your operations teams to quickly isolate problems, and automatically communicate them to the help desk. Cisco Info Center integrates fault management and trouble-ticketing systems, such as Clarify, Peregrine, Remedy, and Siebel with its Cisco Info Center Gateways. It automatically opens trouble tickets for faults, enabling help-desk personnel to proactively manage support operations.
- Reduce alarms and improve service availability—Cisco Info Center's scalability enables many customers to routinely process millions of alarms per day, and through basic correlation and de-duplication, achieve a 10x-100x-reduction rate in the number of alarms staff must manage. In addition, using the advanced analysis and automation functions of Cisco Info Center Impact can help determine the alarms' effect on affected business services and customers, helping staff to prioritize resolution efforts.
ROI
Return on Investment from Cisco Info Center
Cisco Info Center's low training costs and ease of use provide immediate return on investment (ROI). Off-the-shelf Cisco Info Center Mediators andCisco Info Center Service Monitors can be installed quickly—and will immediately begin collecting alarms from a wide variety of data sources. With quick installation and set-up time, Cisco Info Center stores alarms, and performs basic correlation and de-duplication, then sends events to Cisco Info Center and Cisco Info Center Gateways. The Cisco Info Center application provides ROI in three primary areas:
- Higher user productivity—Cisco Info Center reduces interruptions in business productivity by improving network, application, and service uptime.
- Higher service availability—Cisco Info Center helps companies improve service availability and quality through the real-time analysis of network and business-related information.
- IT staff productivity—Cisco Info Center improves IT staff productivity, reduces the cost of day-to-day operations, and allows new initiatives to be implemented more rapidly.
Product Applications
Cisco Info Center Products
The Cisco Info Center family includes the following products:
- Cisco Info Center Info Server—The cornerstone of the Cisco Info Center suite, the Info Server is a high-speed, in-memory database, optimized for collecting events and designing filters and views, which provides the core event processing functions for the Cisco Info Center suite.
- Cisco Info Center Mediators—Center Cisco Info Center Mediators are lightweight agents that collect fault and availability information from APIs, databases, devices, log files, and other utilities, and push them into the Cisco Info Center Info Server for filtering and viewing. The Cisco Info Center 3.6 application can collect fault and availability information from more than 1000 alarm source types. Using Generic Mediators, custom rules files, and Universal Mediators—such as SNMP trapd and TL1—Cisco Info Center can collect data from virtually any networked environment based on Cisco products and other vendors' products.
- Cisco Info Center Service Monitors—Cisco Info Center Service Monitors are lightweight applications that regularly test that network applications, Internet services applications, and wireless services are available for use and are within performance thresholds. Cisco offers several types of service monitors:
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- Internet Service Monitors—Validate networking protocols are properly operating
- System Service Monitors—Help assure systems and services are available and operating
- Application Service Monitors—Confirm applications are operating as expected
- Usage Service Monitors—Generate "threshold-crossing alerts" (TCAs) when usage is above desired amounts
- Data Center Monitors—Analyze mainframe processes for availability and operations
- Cisco Info Center Gateways—Bidirectional interfaces that allow Cisco Info Center Info Server data to be shared with other Cisco Info Center Info Servers, RDBMS archives such as Oracle, Sybase, Informix ODBC, or trouble-ticketing applications such as Remedy AR System, Peregrine Service Center, Clarify Clear-Support.
GUI Features
Cisco Info Center Dashboards Products
The Cisco Info Center Dashboards Family includes the following products and functions:
- Cisco Info Center Desktop and Cisco Info Center Webtop—Cisco Info Center Desktop and Cisco Info Center Webtop make up a suite of graphical operator tools, running on Web browsers, Motif, or Windows NT. Each provides an intuitive interface for customizing filters and service views. The items below describe Cisco Info Center Desktop and Cisco Info Center Webtop components:
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- Event Lists—Efficient spreadsheet-like interfaces into Cisco Info Center Info Server event data that show events color-coded according to severity, allowing access to information useful for troubleshooting each event.
- Cisco Info Center Event List Console—Object-based screen interface showing the status of enterprise-wide services using color-coded histograms, representing a summary of event severity within each service.
- Cisco Info Center Filter Builder—Desktop interface, based on Boolean correlation tools, which allows operators to associate collected event data with the availability of business services.
- Cisco Info Center View Builder—Point-and-click desktop utility that allows operators to design personalized views of events and services. It supports the customization of service views and Cisco Info Center Event Lists.
Feature Highlights
Cisco Info Center 3.6 Feature Highlights:
- More intelligent event reduction—Cisco Info Center 3.6 provides new associative arrays and a new averaging function in the Cisco Info Center Probe rule files. These new features enable Cisco Info Center 3.6 to suppress and manage alarm flood conditions more intelligently. For example, users can apply these features to raise the severity and priority of an alarm if more than a certain number of alarms are received in a given time period as specified by business policy.
- New Cisco Info Center Info Server features—Users can group together related events through the use of new "Group By" SQL syntax, which is now available through Cisco Info Center Info Server automations and in tools such as Cisco Info Center Webtop. An additional new Cisco Info Center Info Server feature controls the number of matches returned by an SQL query. The query will return only the first-relevant specified number of items. These features can reduce the complexity of Cisco Info Center tools that users write.
- Ease of administration—Cisco Info Center 3.6 simplifies the administration of a Cisco Info Center system by providing a System Configuration Replicator. This tool reduces the effort of recreating a test Cisco Info Center system in the production environment. The System Configuration Replicator can also reduce the administration effort required to create a backup of a preexisting Cisco Info Center configuration.
- FLEXlm licensing system—The 3.6 release moves Cisco Info Center onto the FLEXlm Licensing system, a Cisco license-management standard. The new licensing system provides enhanced reliability for remote license servers, and also provides the ability to determine exactly what licensed applications run in the Cisco Info Center system, thus simplifying the administrative burden of license tracking.
- Ease of use—Cisco Info Center 3.6 delivers a new help system that users can customize to provide point-and-click access to problem-resolution sources and procedures. This new Cisco Info Center function helps ensure that operators are not exhausting valuable cycles looking for important problem information, thus decreasing the time and effort to resolution.
- Increased built-in security—Cisco Info Center 3.6 adds significant new security features. Users can configure Cisco Info Center to take advantage of built-in encrypted communications, preventing the unauthorized interception of commercially sensitive information. This helps to secure interception-susceptible network events, thus keeping third parties from reading or altering data.
- Expanded platform support—Cisco Info Center 3.6 introduces support for Solaris 2.9, and desktop support for Windows 2000 Professional.
Specifications
System Specs
For current Solaris-based network management product hardware requirements, refer to the Sun Cisco Optimized Platform Recommendations Table for hardware and part numbering ordering information.
Version Number: Cisco Info Center 3.6
Minimum Memory Required: 64 MB
Disk Space Required: Solaris 200 MB, Windows NT/2000 70 MB
Package Distribution: CD-ROM and FTP download
24-Hour Support: Call Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC)
Platform Support
Platform Requirements
Sun Microsystems Sparc-based platforms:
Microsoft Corp. server platforms:
Summary
The Cisco Info Center suite of products offers an integrated solution for end-to-end fault management and service-level assurance, which allows your business to maintain and improve the quality of network services, retain customers, and sustain a competitive advantage. With an attractive entry point and distributed architecture enabling, Cisco Info Center to scale to accommodate any size network, Cisco Info Center is positioned for Fortune 2000 corporations and service providers that want a fully integrated solution for helping to ensure that their network, network-based services, and business are operating at maximum productivity without increasing the cost of day-to-day operations.
For Further Information
For information about Cisco Info Center, visit:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/netmgtsw/ps996/index.html