Worldwide [change] |Account |Register |About Cisco
Guest

Hierarchical Navigation

Cisco Monitor Director

Cisco Monitor Director 1.1.2: Essential for VAR Managed Services

Downloads

The surge of growth in the small and medium-sized business (SMB) segment of the networking market has created huge revenue potential for Cisco® partners and managed service providers (MSPs). More than 90 percent of the world's economy consists of SMBs, making the impact of this segment huge. Cisco managed service providers can seize this opportunity by moving away from the reactive break-and-fix model and becoming proactive "trusted advisors" for their SMB customers. For partners to survive, they would need to support a high number of SMBs, helping them to migrate to advanced voice services with efficiency and quick turnarounds.

Solution Overview

Deployed at the partner location, Cisco Monitor Director 1.1.2 is a centralized, proactive network management application for Cisco managed service providers planning to offer 24-hour, proactive voice and data network monitoring and management services to their SMB customers. Cisco Monitor Director works with Cisco Monitor Manager and operates as its agent. This agent is deployed at SMB corporate headquarters and remote offices. Cisco Monitor Manager collects customer network data and reports it back over a secure communication channel to Cisco Monitor Director, giving managed service providers secure access and visibility into the customers' networks. With this solution deployed, managed service providers have full visibility into their SMB customers' networks and can proactively anticipate network issues before they affect their customers' businesses. See Figure 1.

Figure 1. Cisco Monitor Manager with Cisco Monitor Director

Cisco Monitor Director Features and Benefits

Table 1 lists the features and benefits of Cisco Monitor Director.

Table 1. Features and Benefits

Feature

Benefits

Ease of use and low initial investment
• Built for VARs offering managed services to SMB customers
• Intuitive and easy to use system

Distributed and scalable architecture
• Scales to communicate with up to 100 instances of Cisco Monitor Manager

Web-based access
• Browser-based access from anywhere in the network
• End-customer access to online reports
• Different user roles for administrator, network operations center (NOC) engineer, and end customer

Central dashboard
• Provides consolidated view of all customer sites being monitored by Cisco Monitor Manager

Branding
• Branding of customer portal and reports with MSP company name and logo

Alert escalation
• Escalation of alerts to help ensure resolution of network issues in timely manner

Localized report
• Localized monthly network summary report
• Report available in Chinese (Simplified), French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish

Integrated license report
• Monitors and reports the license status and license expiration dates of all implementations of Cisco Monitor Manager at SMB locations

Support for external database
• Choice to use common database for several applications.
• (Cisco Monitor Director) Optionally connects to an external database on local or remote server

Applications
• Manages multitenant units
• Offers VAR managed services: The Cisco Monitor Manager software operates as an agent for. Cisco Monitor Director to help MSPs offer managed services.

Cisco Discovery Protocol and Address Resolution Protocol (ARP)-based network discovery and complete topology
• Discovers entire data and Cisco Unified Communications voice network
• Discovers Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)-capable and IP-addressable multivendor devices
• Rich graphical topology views span multiple customer locations, displaying the total network with unified topologies and interconnections
• Displays network and device-level fault information, device connectivity, and manageability information

Support for Cisco devices, SNMP-capable multivendor devices, and Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) ping-based monitoring
• Premium support for supported Cisco devices
• Generic SNMP-based management for SNMP-capable multivendor devices
• Basic monitoring for non-SNMP-capable devices

Secure and reliable communication between SMB and MSP VAR
• Uses secure and reliable Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connection to communicate with Cisco Monitor Manager
• Includes configurable SSL port for improved security

SNMP and highly secure and reliable channel to the managed devices
• Uses SNMP to discover, retrieve configuration and performance information, and manage network elements in the customer's network
• Uses HTTPS to manage Cisco security appliances
• Cisco Monitor Manager also uses ICMP ping to manage non-SNMP-capable devices.

Individual customer topology map
• (Cisco Monitor Director) Displays complete network topology of each customer network
• Displays network- and device-level fault information and device connectivity and manageability information

End-of-sale and end-of-life reports
• Provides end-of-sale and end-of-life reports to predict network upgrade requirements

Real-time alerts and notifications through e-mail and pagers
• Displays real-time fault-monitoring information
• Interfaces to common trouble-ticketing applications
• Displays user-friendly performance charts and graphs
• Generates and dispatches notifications based on user-defined threshold-crossing alerts

Scheduled customized reports
• Generates monthly summary report to keep busy customers updated on the status of their network
• Through monthly summary report, provides useful information about overall network health that includes alerts summary and usage trends of various parameters such as CPU, memory, bandwidth, and so on

Networkwide inventory collection and reporting
• Provides complete device-inventory information, including card and interface details for all managed devices in the SMB network
• Provides inventory reports that can be used to keep track of devices and cards in the SMB network

Built-in troubleshooting tools
• Facilitates debugging of network problems by providing troubleshooting tools such as traceroute and ping

IP telephony monitoring
• Offers discovery, inventory, and monitoring of Cisco Unified IP telephony elements
• Provides real-time information about connectivity and registration status of Cisco Unified IP telephony elements
• Raises alerts on Cisco Unified IP telephony elements based on their service status
• Through voice mailbox monitoring, keeps track of the size of the mailbox and creates alerts based on the configured threshold limits
• Monitors public switched telephone network (PSTN) trunk and voice-port usage

Performance and interface traffic monitoring
• Collects, stores, and displays important real-time monitoring information with output options of charts and graphs
• Compares monitoring data against user-defined thresholds and generates threshold-crossing alerts to the user
• Monitors interface traffic statistics and displays interface usage
• Monitors CPU and memory usage for all managed devices

Configuration archive
• Facilitates backup and restore of startup configuration files
• Offers ability for network users to also select the option of saving running configuration files prior to manual or periodic backup

Syslog-based alerting and reporting
• Collects and stores syslog messages from managed devices
• Generates alerts and reports of syslog messages

Device manager launch point
• Supports the launch of various Cisco device managers such as Cisco Adaptive Security Device Manager, Cisco Router and Security Device Manager, and Cisco PIX® Device Manager

Persistent storage of monitored data and device credentials for historical reporting with built-in database
• Uses built-in database to store inventory, performance, and syslog data
• Supports the ability to view, report, and analyze historical data

Discovery and monitoring of VPN peers
• Discovers VPN peers across SMB locations
• Monitors status and traffic parameters of VPN tunnels

Product Availability

Cisco Monitor Director 1.1.2 and Cisco Monitor Manager 1.1.2 will be available on November 5, 2007.

Ordering Information

Cisco's pricing strategy for Cisco Monitor Director aligns with how Cisco authorized partners charge their customers for their remote MSP services. Typically, this is an annual subscription service, based on the number of network users or the number of devices in the network. The solution consists of two products: Cisco Monitor Manager for the end-user customer site and Cisco Monitor Director at the Cisco partner site. These two products are offered individually, and Cisco partners will need to order one copy of Cisco Monitor Director and at least one Cisco Monitor Manager to offer managed services. This solution can be scaled up to a maximum of 100 Cisco Monitor Managers by ordering multiple Cisco Monitor Managers in increments of one.
The solution is also offered without licenses for a 60-day evaluation period. License purchases following the evaluation period are required for continued use of the product, and license renewals can be purchased following the end of a one-year deployment. Cisco Monitor Director is available for purchase through regular Cisco sales and distribution channels worldwide. To place an order, visit the Cisco Ordering Homepage.
A free 60-day evaluation version of the latest Cisco Monitor Director software can be downloaded from http://www.cisco.com/cgi-bin/tablebuild.pl/CiscoMD-crypto. To purchase a one-year subscription license for use beyond the initial evaluation period, please contact your Cisco sales representative.
Table 2 lists ordering information for Cisco Monitor Director.

Table 2. Ordering Information for Cisco Monitor Director

Part Number

Description

DIR-1.1-MSP-SW-K9

Cisco Monitor Director 1.1.2 Software, Perpetual License

MON-1.1-MSP-25-K9

Cisco Monitor Manager 1.1.2 SW 1 Year 25 Device MSP License

MON-1.1-MSP-70-K9

Cisco Monitor Manager 1.1.2 SW 1 Year 70 Device MSP License

MON-1.1-LSMSPUP-K9

Cisco Monitor Manager 1.1.2 25 Device to 70 Device MSP License

For More Information

For more information about Cisco Monitor Director, visit http://www.cisco.com/go/cmd or contact your local Cisco account representative.