Cisco's IP-PBX management product is called the Cisco Unified Communications Management Suite. It is a collection of four applications: the Unified Service Statistics Manager, Unified Service Monitor, Unified Provisioning Manager and Unified Operations Manager. Cisco markets the suite as being designed to provide full product lifecycle management from pre-assessment to post-deployment. We looked at management for the entire IP-PBX solution.
Overall, this is one of the very first packages we saw that does try to comprehensively cover all aspects of the lifecycle of a PBX, from getting it running and quickly provisioned, to handling day-to-day operations. With all of its pieces, we could pull the statistics out and dump them into another analytical package for further review.
All applications are what we call "Ciscotized." They all operate within the realm of Cisco's overall look and feel.
Unified Provisioning Manager
This product is targeted at enterprises that have 500 or more phones deployed. As the name implies, Unified Provisioning Manager is designed for deployment scenarios of new IP-PBX installations. It requires a dedicated server with four GB of RAM and a 3-GHz processor. Unified Provisioning Manager runs on Windows 2003 Server SE and has a Web-based interface that requires Microsoft IE v6 or later.
Operating with a single, permanent license, it sets up devices – meaning call processors and other unified communication units. Unified Provisioning Manager also sets up deployment for configuration of domains and service areas, and it helps with batch deployments.
After the system is up and running properly, Unified Provisioning Manager is still useful. It tracks inventory, advising the administrator of extension availability and types of phones required for specific areas of the company or workgroups. Administrators can define employee roles and telephony rights. This tool significantly reduced time and cost of deployment because it steps you through the entire process and helps avoid errors.
Unified Operations Manager
Cisco’s Unified Operations Manager is used for general PBX management, troubleshooting and fault notification. It is your typical NOC application, with a dashboard view that shows where you can set up service levels for specific groups of phones. The system can issue alerts in a number of ways, including e-mails and audible tones. We found Unified Operation Manager easy to use and responsive when we created issues that caused alerts.
The Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) shows which devices are connected to each other and provides performance statistics, such as how many calls were handled and how many trunks are up.
You can also launch a device center which will do an SNMP “walk” to communicate with devices on a management level and pull pertinent information from them. Also, from that graphical screen you can suspend viewing of selected devices. So if you know somebody is doing an upgrade on a piece of hardware, you can tell the Unified Operations Manager to ignore the device and stop sending off alerts.
There's a diagnostic tab to set up tests to occur on scheduled and periodic basis, a tab for reporting, a tab for notification services, a device tab that activates a network search for telephony devices, and an administrative tab where you set up users and overall operations.
Unified Service Monitor
The Unified Service Monitor is used for reporting, configuration of thresholds and monitoring of those thresholds for voice quality. It does this by looking at either Cisco Voice Transmission Quality (VTQ) readings (described by Cisco as an endpoint MOS estimation algorithm “that represents the weighted estimate of ‘average user’ annoyance caused by effective packet loss”); or Cisco 1040 probes that can be installed at remote sites. The Unified Service Monitor keeps track of all the phones physically deployed and the associated licenses.
We liked the way the Unified Service Monitor can be launched directly from the Unified Operations Manager, and that it can feed its findings up to the Cisco Unified Service Statistics Manager.
Unified Service Statistics Manager
This piece basically does historical reporting, analysis and trending. It starts with a dashboard view that can be customized with your specific reports, such as bandwidth, trunk utilization, quality and call volume. It is on a dedicated server.
The Unified Service Statistics Manager can be used for monitoring trunk utilization. If you’re using T1 between two offices, you can look at trending over the past 3 months to see if you are consuming more bandwidth over time on that pipe. It’s a pretty basic, classical historical reporting engine with a nice dashboard that can be customized.
