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CiscoWorks IP Telephony Monitor (ITM) 2.0 is part of the CiscoWorks IP Telephony Environment Monitor (ITEM) suite of applications that continuously evaluate and report the operational health of Cisco IP telephony implementations. ITEM is used to manage Cisco AVVID (Architecture for Voice, Video and Integrated Data) and Cisco IOS® Software-based IP telephony environments, and provides specialized operations and security tools beneficial to large and small IP telephony implementations.
CiscoWorks ITM is the primary application of the ITEM suite. ITM tracks the health of IP telephony environments by proactively monitoring Cisco voice elements in the network to alert operations personnel to potential problems and to help minimize IP telephony service downtime. ITM is designed to work out of the box. It supports most Cisco routers, switches, access servers, and other devices commonly used in IP telephony implementations. In particular, ITM supports the health monitoring of Cisco AVVID, Cisco CallManager, Cisco AVVID IP telephony applications and platforms, Cisco IOS Telephony-based hardware, the gateways and gatekeepers, and inline power switches.
ITM also provides real-time fault detection and determination about the underlying Cisco IP fabric on which the IP telephony implementation executes. ITM reports faults that occur on Cisco network devices, often identifying problems before users of network services realize that a problem exists. ITM supports more than 200 types of the most popular Cisco routers, switches, access servers, and hubs. For each of these supported devices, ITM automatically looks for a broad spectrum of common problems at the device and virtual LAN (VLAN) level, all without ever requiring operations managers to write rules or set polling or threshold values.
The most significant enhancement to ITM is the new user provides a proactive, Web-based operations screen that provides real-time status and alerting of actual and suspected problems in the underlying IP network as well as in the IP telephony implementation. This display, called the Alerts and Activities Display (AAD), can be customized to display all or selected elements in the managed space. For example, product or technology specialists can define specific areas of interest and display only alerts and notifications for subsets of the installation, while generalists can continue to monitor the entire network. Visual cues provide continuous notification of the status of all alerts and the operator can drill-down to the actual cause or suspect event that generated the alert at any time.
Like earlier releases, Release 2.0 of the CiscoWorks IP Telephony Monitor (ITM) still relies on the proven, underlying technologies provided by what were separate products in the past. The field-validated functionality of the former CiscoWorks Voice Health Monitor (VHM) and Device Fault Manager (DFM) fault assessment and correlation products have been integrated into ITEM. Their user interfaces have been replaced by the AAD. CiscoWorks Common Services has also been incorporated and provides common database, web, and desktop services and security to integrate with other Cisco and third-party tools. Release 2.0 is delivered and installed from a single CD media.
CiscoWorks ITM continues to execute confidence tests to evaluate the general health of the IP telephony environment in the monitored network. CiscoWorks ITM makes use of its sophisticated evaluation and correlation capabilities to ensure timely information about the health of IP telephony environments. Using several data collection and analysis techniques, CiscoWorks ITM generates intelligent traps that can be forwarded to other event-management systems installed in the network, sent to e-mail or pager gateways, or displayed on the ITM AAD.
ITM can be used as a Cisco fault subsystem generating intelligent traps to other event-management systems installed in the network. Cisco has worked closely with a range of enterprise management systems, enabling these intelligent Cisco traps to be displayed properly in their respective event systems.
As new Cisco IP-telephony-enabling devices are added to the network, ITM can be updated easily with an incremental device update capability available from the Cisco Software Center. Operations managers do not need to write rules for any new devices added through incremental updates for CiscoWorks ITM to analyze and report voice-related faults in the Cisco network.
CiscoWorks ITM 2.0 is intended for a dedicated hardware platform executing Microsoft Windows 2000. ITM is intended to isolate operations and maintenance personnel from the complexity of many IP telephony implementations. Because this requires significant resources, no other application or management program can share or utilize the ITM hardware platform. As a general rule, the larger the hardware platform (speed and number of processors) and the more system memory (a minimum of 2 gigabytes is required) that is available will improve the performance and scalability of the management solution provided by ITM 2.0.
Posted: Tue Sep 23 00:04:19 PDT 2003
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