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Cisco Service Path Analyzer

Cisco Service Path Analyzer 1.0

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Cisco® Service Path Analyzer (SPA) is a newly announced Cisco network management product that delivers-through continuous network monitoring-a high-fidelity Layer 3 view of the IP control plane. By listening to routing protocols and related activity, the product reconstructs the state of the network and its service paths, providing a representation of all the Layer 3 components and paths in "network-time." The intelligence delivered by Cisco SPA makes possible a preventive, rather than a reactive, network management capability. Network operators and engineers can pinpoint a variety of persistent and transient problems that are difficult to diagnose-or even invisible-with traditional management techniques and tools.

New Capabilities

Network-time, high-fidelity view of network and paths: Listening to all routing protocol messages allows Cisco SPA to derive and display a real-time graphical view of both the Layer 3 topology and the paths between selected source/destination pairs. This capability is completely nondisruptive to ongoing network operation and imposes no burden on routers or other network elements-in sharp contrast to Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)-based solutions that employ polling to extract data from network elements, placing loads on routers and impairing their performance.
Proactive and forensic analysis of IP network problems: Cisco SPA helps enable service owners, network engineers, and operators to diagnose and resolve problems much more rapidly than previously possible. A survey of trouble tickets and their resolution times indicates that, in complex network environments, 80 percent of time to fix is spent in isolating the problem and determining the root cause. Cisco SPA dramatically reduces this time by simplifying the diagnosis of problems related to the IP layer. In particular, Cisco SPA offers:

• Detection and isolation of routing problems not found through conventional tools

• Root-cause determination of service path disruptions

• Comparison of the as-running with the as-configured state to detect misconfiguration issues

Customizable alerts and reports: Cisco SPA offers a comprehensive set of reports and alarms, many of them configurable by the network operator. For example:

• Detailed reports on availability, routing operation, and network stability, which can be summarized on a regular basis and used as the basis for determining overall network operation

• Comprehensive alarms providing real-time notification directly to personnel or to other systems, including changes in link state or metrics, temporary loss of connectivity or redundancy, and their impact on critical services

Interface to third party systems: Cisco SPA easily interfaces with fault and network management and other third-party systems and fits seamlessly into existing operational environments with little need for changes to established methods and procedures.
Simple installation and configuration: Cisco SPA is easily deployed using network appliances fully compliant with stringent carrier and enterprise management and security standards along with a PC-based management console. The appliances are:

• Listeners: One rack-mount unit (1U) appliances that host the data collection software of the Cisco SPA platform

• Servers: Two rack-mount unit (2U) appliances with RAID 5 redundancy, dual power-supply units (PSUs) and significant processing power to host the analytics/diagnostic software and database

• Management console: A Java-based thick-client GUI runs as a PC application to communicate with the server appliance and facilitate high-quality display and manipulation of visually rendered data. Multiple management consoles can operate against a single server.

A typical deployment may have a couple of listeners and a single server. The distributed design of the system delivers scalability and resistance to failure.

New Features

Track down transient failures that are not visible to other systems. A recent survey of customer trouble tickets found that for every failure longer than 5 minutes detected by SNMP systems, there were 10 times as many transient failures that are shorter and often undetected by today's systems. Transient failures were of little consequence for traditional data services but can degrade the quality of real-time IP applications such as voice. Cisco SPA helps enable network operators to detect and address these types of transient failures.
Rapidly identify logical errors that are unseen by other systems. Logical errors with major (that is, network-wide) impact are captured in real time and (optionally) alarmed on; such errors include:

• Announcement/withdrawal of routes

• Improper default route provisioning

• Black-hole routes

• Over-/undersummarization of address space

• Faulty configurations

• Incorrect metric changes

• Route leaking

• Redundancy/equal-cost-multipath failures

• Duplicate IP addressing

Provide accelerated root-cause analysis for outages and suggest remedial actions. Cisco SPA can store and replay historical events allowing engineers to "rewind" the state of the network and replay network events. This capability helps enable service and network operations personnel to uncover problems and establish correlations with extrinsic events to identify the root cause of past service disruptions. The result: A dramatic reduction in the time to fix many Layer 3 problems.

Benefits

• Maximize customer satisfaction by increasing service availability. Cisco SPA reduces the service disruptions and increases the quality of service through its ability to see the network as the network sees itself.

• Cut operating costs by improving productivity of human and network resources. Cisco SPA trims down the cost of day-to-day operations by helping enable staff to pinpoint potential service issues through vastly reduced diagnosis time and predictive root-cause analysis.

• Roll out new services faster by collecting information instrumental in determining network readiness prior to initiation. Cisco SPA provides organizations with data before the actual traffic flows, offering visibility to the stability of the network and whether it will permit the desired service level. Launching new products and services on time and meeting customer expectations can drastically affect your new product revenues and customer loyalty.

• Realize higher productivity from complementary Cisco applications, such as Cisco Info Center, CiscoWorks, and Cisco Active Network Abstraction (ANA), by providing invaluable network intelligence as inputs for these assets.

• Boost return of previous investments by enhancing existing infrastructure and applications. Cisco SPA feeds real-time information to existing fault, performance, and network management solutions, such as Cisco Info Center, IBM Tivoli, HP OpenView, HP TeMIP, EMC Smarts, CA Spectrum, and others. Cisco SPA helps enable these products to meet the challenges and demands of converged networks and real-time applications.

• Achieve rapid return of investment through rapid deployment, ease of use, and low training costs. Off-the-shelf Cisco SPA servers and listeners can be installed swiftly-and will immediately begin providing information about a wide range of IP network sources.

• Protect current investments by offering a highly scalable architecture. The groundbreaking three-tier architecture permits Cisco SPA to grow with the increasing demands of your organization.

Availability

Cisco Service Path Analyzer is available now. You can order Cisco SPA through normal Cisco sales channels.

Ordering Information

For more information on Cisco Service Path Analyzer 1.0 and ordering details, please contact your local Cisco account representative.

Service and Support

Using the Cisco Lifecycle Services approach, Cisco and its partners provide a broad portfolio of end-to-end services and support that can help increase your network's business value and return on investment. This approach defines the minimum set of activities needed, by technology and by network complexity, to help you successfully deploy and operate Cisco technologies and optimize their performance throughout the lifecycle of your network.

For More Information

For more information about Cisco Service Path Analyzer 1.0, visit http://www.cisco.com/go/cspa, contact your local Cisco account representative, or send an e-mail to the product marketing group at ask-cspa@cisco.com.