Cisco Info Center Monitoring

Cisco Info Center Monitoring helps you optimize IT infrastructure performance and availability. Based on the market leading Tivoli technology from IBM, Cisco Info Center Monitoring software manages operating systems, databases, servers, and applications in distributed and host environments.

Highlights

●   Improve incident avoidance capabilities with dynamic thresholds to spot abnormal server behavior and integrated performance and capacity management to monitor, alert, and report on future capacity bottlenecks.

●   Facilitate proactive management of transactions and applications, identifying bottlenecks and other potential problems before they affect customer satisfaction.

●   Make new operators highly productive by using common visualization, common data, and common reporting to provide side-by-side real-time and historical views, expert advice, and automated best practices in response to incidents.

●   Monitor Cisco Unified Computing System correlating physical infrastructure, operating system, hypervisor, and applications.

●   Seamless integration with Cisco Info Center Network Manager and Business Service Manager to provide end-to-end service management of applications, servers, and networks including Nexus and Catalyst^® switches in a single real-time dashboard.

●   Monitor multivendor servers, operating systems, and applications including Linux, AIX, Windows, Solaris, HP UX, VMware, Microsoft Applications, DB2, SAP, PeopleSoft, and many others.

●   Cisco Info Center Monitoring for Energy Management uses Cisco EnergyWise to manage energy usage of IT and facility resources for efficient data center operation, lower operating cost, and reduced carbon emissions.

●   Realize faster value with a streamlined installation and implementation, as well as lightweight agents supported by integrated software distribution and self-monitoring capabilities.

●   Automatically discover and model operating system and application dependencies and correlate to performance metrics and alarms.

Features and Benefits

Integrated Physical and Virtual Operating System Management

As server consolidation places mission-critical applications into virtual environments and ever more powerful physical servers, Cisco Info Center Monitoring offers an integrated solution for monitoring, viewing, analyzing, forecasting, and managing these environments across the enterprise. With the promise of virtualization came the promise of lower hardware and software costs. This can only be achieved with good visualization and control of these new proliferating environments. Cisco Info Center Monitoring provides this visualization and control. See Figure 1. It can also be easily extended to support the virtualized applications and application infrastructures by simply adding more agents from the Cisco Info Center Monitoring family. In one package Cisco Info Center Monitoring enables the monitoring and management of:

●   Physical operating systems: IBM AIX, Microsoft Windows, Linux, Sun Solaris, HP-UX, IBMi5/OS

●   Virtual operating systems: AIX LPAR/DLPAR/WPAR, Sun Solaris Zones, VMware, and virtual machines

●   Virtual client environments: Citrix

Server and Operating Management with Cisco Info Center

Support for Cisco Unified Computing Environment

Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) unifies network, compute, storage access, and virtualization into a single, cohesive system. Cisco Unified Computing System Manager provides a single point of management for the entire server array, including I/O fabric, chassis and servers, adapters, and virtual I/O. Integration with Cisco Info Center software provides the capability to augment the embedded UCS Manager with information about blade-resident operating systems, applications, and virtual machines. You see information about the hardware and software components that affects the user experience, all from one place.

Proactive Management of Transactions, Identifying Bottlenecks Before They Affect Customer Satisfaction

Cisco Info Center Composite Application Monitoring for Transactions provides end-to-end transaction tracking and visualization capabilities, allowing IT teams to more quickly and easily isolate problems and, in turn, allowing faster problem resolution. This comprehensive solution also provides capabilities for real end-user monitoring, robotic monitoring, and Internet service monitoring.

Visualization and Control and Reporting

Making decisions about server utilization, allocating critical and scarce resources between virtual environments, or even isolating the source of a problem in a business service can be hard when the necessary information is locked away in relational databases, tables, or manually maintained spreadsheets. This is critical functionality that should not be in an “add on” or “separately chargeable” package. With Cisco Info Center reporting, documentation for management decisions is quickly available, visualized, and formatted to identify critical information such as peak hours of usage. The server utilization can be quickly visualized by week, day of the week, hour of the day, or even a string of hours over a given week. This kind of information once visualized makes management decisions more accurate and timely and provides supporting documentation for those decisions.

Manage Energy Usage of IT and Facility Resources for Efficient Data Center Operations

Cisco Info Center Monitoring for Energy Management uses Cisco EnergyWise to optimize your energy consumption for higher efficiency of resources, lower operating cost, and reduced carbon emissions.

●   Gain insight into energy and thermal information for IT equipment, data center infrastructure, and facilities equipment and facilitate the optimization of the monitored environment from a centralized point of control

●   Store real-time, historic, and trending energy and thermal metrics in a common repository to aid in decision making and for use by other Cisco Info Center service management solutions

●   Use integration with Cisco Info Center Business Service Manager to understand the business service impact of energy optimization decisions

●   Pull energy usage information into Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager to facilitate energy-related consumption and chargeback capabilities

●   Use enhanced reporting capabilities to estimate the potential power and cost savings of proposed energy optimization recommendations

●   Use enhanced workspaces, views, situations, and reports for third-party power meters

Strive for Higher Availability with Incident Avoidance

The goal for most systems management products is to improve the mean time to recovery once the server has failed. The goal is to make sure that the operations team can restore service as quickly as possible. Cisco Info Center Monitoring provides some unique tools such as incident historical navigation to improve the mean time to recovery. Cisco Info Center Monitoring also incorporates new technology to assist with incident avoidance. Through dynamic thresholding and performance analytics, customers may get the equivalent of an “early warning system” that may allow them to start working an incident before it impacts the end-user community business application or business service.

●   Incident historical navigation is a graphical time-based incident investigation mode. This allows the operator, once an incident timeframe has been identified, to “zoom in” and “lock the incident time frame.” The operator can then move between the Cisco Info Center Monitoring monitored resources, preserving the incident time frame, looking for any anomalies. In minutes rather than hours, a performance or service interruption anomaly could be identified and action taken.

●   Dynamic thresholds, in contrast to fixed thresholds, baselines a server’s normal behavior over a specified period of time. Dynamic thresholds are set to alert on abnormal server behavior. They may alert at the first indication of a problem that would affect overall application performance. This allows the IT operations team to start working on and resolving a problem earlier - maybe even before users are aware of the problem.

Achieve Better Business Results with Agentless and Agent-Driven Technologies

By supporting both agent and agentless technologies, Cisco Info Center Monitoring provides a balance between the cost containment characteristics of agentless technology with the mission-critical application monitoring capabilities associated with agent technology.

Agentless Monitoring to Contain Costs

Agentless technology helps to lower costs. Agentless technology is generally lower priced and is less expensive to manage and maintain. Quite simply, agentless does less but with less management overhead. Agentless technology, because it does not install or utilize a remote agent on each managed server, has faster speed of implementation and reduced management costs associated with deploying and maintaining a remote agent. Testing costs may also be reduced or eliminated by using standard interfaces already present on the server. The network though is critical to utilization and a central point of failure for polling. Polling will utilize network bandwidth and polling intervals will also result in a notification delay in case of a server application or business service outage.

Agent Monitoring for Higher Availability

Agent technology is suited for mission-critical applications. It can provide unique, detailed, and more granular data on the services it monitors. It provides a store and forward capability, is recoverable, and can continue to function when the network is down. Agent code on the server also provides the ability to implement independent automated remote actions. It has little impact on the network as it can suppress server-side messages, and the sizing of the central management servers is not as critical since processing workload is distributed on the monitored servers. If alert timing is essential, agent technology can provide near real-time alerting to a system outage, in turn allowing faster problem resolution. This comprehensive solution also provides capabilities for real end-user monitoring, robotic monitoring, and Internet service monitoring

Be More Responsive with Consolidated Event Management

Add advanced event management with Cisco Info Center Omnibus and Cisco Info Center Network Manager. Take control of your events through event automation, event filtering, event de-duplication, and identifying the root cause from symptom events. Consequently, the IT staff can move quickly to isolate a failing component, diagnose the problem, and resolve the incident.

Solution Components

The Cisco Info Center Monitoring and Composite Application Monitoring Family consists of:

●   Cisco Info Center Monitoring: Heterogeneous physical and virtual operating system support: IBM AIX, Microsoft Windows, Linux, Sun Solaris, HP-UX, IBMi5/OS, AIX LPAR/DLPAR/WPAR, Sun Solaris Zones, VMware, and virtual machines

●   Cisco Info Center Monitoring for Microsoft Applications: Integrate Microsoft’s applications and application infrastructure environments with support for Microsoft Windows Server (including Microsoft Cluster and Microsoft Hyper-V), Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Active Directory, Microsoft IIS Server, Microsoft .NET, Sharepoint, and Biztalk, along with VMware and Citrix

●   Cisco Info Center Composite Application Monitoring: Integrate heterogeneous applications and application infrastructure environments with support for SAP, Siebel, PeopleSoft Enterprise, DB/2, Oracle, Sybase, Lotus Notes, and Websphere

●   Cisco Info Center Composite Application Monitoring for Transactions: Extend monitoring to include the end-user’s application transaction experience and the Internet technologies this infrastructure depends on such as Domain Name System (DNS) and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) servers

●   Cisco Info Center Composite Application Monitoring for WebSphere/J2EE: Diagnostic capabilities for subject matter experts in the areas of web sphere and J2EE

Ordering Information

For more information on Cisco Info Center and ordering details, please contact the product marketing group at ask‑cic@external.cisco.com.