Release Notes for Cisco Insight Reporter, v3.1
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Release Notes for Cisco Insight Reporter, v3.1
Compatibility with Cisco DPI Devices
Differences with Cisco Insight Reporter v3.0
New Report Topics added for ASR Networks
Obtaining Documentation and Submitting a Service Request
Release Notes for Cisco Insight Reporter, v3.1
November 2011This document describes the operating environment and the defects and caveats that were identified as part of internal testing and during the live trials.
It assumes the reader has a good working knowledge of the Cisco Insight Reporter software. For additional information, please refer the following documents that are delivered as a part of this release.
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Cisco Insight Reporter v3.1 Installation Guide
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Contents
This document covers the following
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Target Operating Environment
The Cisco Insight Reporter is the web reporting application to monitor traffic analyzed by the DPI capabilities of the Cisco Service Control Engine (SCE) and Aggregated Services Router 1000 Series (ASR1K).
The Cisco Insight Reporter software is primarily designed to be installed as an independent component on a dedicated hardware, this scenario is the most suitable for medium/large SCE/ASR1K deployments for which it is advisable to keep the data collection and storage layers on separated hardware and dedicate all the server resources to the Cisco Insight Reporter application.
For demo purpose or small SCE/ASR1k deployments, the application can be installed on the same host as the Cisco Collection Manager (CM). In this scenario, the embedded MySQL 5.1 database engine, provided with the application, needs to be used to store traffic data and the CM must be configured to populate it.
The application can also be installed on a deployed server with the CM software and its traffic database but, in this case, the database technology needs to be MySQL 5.1.
The software can be deployed also on virtualized systems provided that the hosted operating system is compliant and that all the requirements on prerequisites are met.
Hardware Requirements
The Cisco Insight Reporter can be installed on any physical or virtual host with the following minimal specifications:
In case of doubt, you can contact Cisco Support to get an estimation of the required CPU power, RAM capacity and disk storage.
Note
The above recommendation is for a good response time when running ONLY the Cisco Insight Reporter application. In case the same server is used to co-host other applications, the hardware has to be upgraded with more RAM, CPU power and storage capacity.
Software Requirements
You can install Cisco Insight Reporter on any server running the following operating systems:
Table 2 Supported Operating Systems
Red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS
5.x
Intel x86 32/64 bit
Solaris
SPARC 32/64 bit
9 or 10
Intel x86 32/64 bit
Note
Supported Browsers
The Cisco Insight Reporter is compliant with the following browsers:
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Note
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Screen Resolution
The application GUI supports a variety of screen resolution modes including 1280x1024, 1024x768, and 1680x1050 with consistent support of 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios (wide screen). For a better user experience it is recommended to use a minimum vertical resolution of 1024 pixels.
Note
To maximize the user experience, it is suggested to set the browser to full-screen mode (that can be set usually by pressing the F11 function key).
Supported Databases
The Cisco Insight Reporter is delivered with a bundled MySQL 5.1 database that is used for internal operations, but can also be used to store traffic data populated by the Cisco Collector Manager software.
Note
In this case, it is possible to use either the bundled MySQL or to install a standalone MySQL 5.1 engine (and not install the bundled MySQL shipped with the application).
However, even if the database engine is unique, the data schemas of the application will be separated by the Collection Manager schema containing traffic data.
When traffic data is not stored on the bundled database, the Cisco Insight Reporter can connect to external data sources as it supports the same database technology as the Cisco Collection Manager software:
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Supporting multi-vendor drivers allows connecting to the CM databases to retrieve traffic data and SCE/ASR1K configurations
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Compatibility with Cisco DPI Devices
Cisco Insight Reporter v3.1 is the reporting platform for both the Cisco Service Control Application and the Application Visibility & Control solutions. As such, it supports the following Cisco DPI devices:
Table 3 Supported DPI devices and releases
SCE (1010, 2020, 8000)
3.5.0 to 3.7.21
3.5.0 to 3.7.22
ASR 1000 series
XE 3.4 and 3.5
3.7.0 and 3.7.1
1 SCE OS and SCA BB v3.7.2 will be released after the delivery of Cisco Insight Reporter v3.1
2 SCE OS and SCA BB v3.7.2 will be released after the delivery of Cisco Insight Reporter v3.1
Differences with Cisco Insight Reporter v3.0
The Cisco Insight Reporter v3.1 provides all the functional features of its previous release as it is an incremental version.
The current release mainly adds new reports and supports the latest CM database schema v3.7.1.
It is 100% compatible with existing v2.0.x and v3.0 deployments and supports software upgrade to allow customers to perform a seamless installation of the application without the need to reconfigure all the settings and the existing report customizations (SCE/ASR1K networks, saved/scheduled reports, dashboard, color settings, etc.)
The following matrix describes the main differences between the two versions:
Table 4 Comparison with v3.0
Web2.0 GUI
Yes, based on Flex client
CM database positioning
(traffic database)
One or more external DBs
Can also use the internal MySQL 5.1 instance
Multi-vendor database support
MySQL, Oracle, Sybase
SCA BB report template support
(CM DB schemas)
3.5.0, 3.5.5, 3.6.0, 3.6.5, 3.7.0
also 3.7.21
ASR1K report template support
(CM DB schemas)
IOS XE 3.4
(CM 3.7.0)
also IOS XE 3.5
(CM 3.7.1)
Multi-device configurations
Yes, with report configuration
Authentication support with external AAA servers
Yes, support of RADIUS and TACACS+
Deployment architecture
Can be installed on a single appliance or distributed
1 SCA BB v3.7.2 will be released after the delivery of Cisco Insight Reporter v3.1
The current release also provides a series of new reports as well as several bug fixes identified during the support cycle of its previous release 3.0.0.
New Report Topics added for ASR Networks
New reports are available following sub-topics
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b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
g.
Note
Cisco Insight Reporter v3.0.0 supports the following direct upgrade paths:
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Closed Caveats
The following defects have been fixed since the delivery of release v3.0.0:
Open Caveats
Open Caveats due to external dependencies
The following issues are due to dependencies on external or third-party software components and cannot be resolved on the Cisco Insight Reporter until the anomaly is fixed on the dependency.
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When connecting to the application using the Mozilla Firefox browser, the taskbar of the browser window keeps displaying the message "Transferring data from..." or "Connecting to...", as if there is some ongoing activity, even if the page has finished loading.
This behavior is not dependent on the Cisco Insight Reporter application but it is due to a known Firefox bug with the Adobe Flash plug-in, as documented at the following link:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=383811
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This report requires the union between two queries executed on the RPT_LUR and RPT_GUR tables.
If these two tables are not populated with the same time aggregation, the report can produce weird results (spikes and negative samples).
The defect cannot be resolved on the Insight Reporter until the Collection Manager does not support the time aggregation feature on the RPT_GUR table.
Summary:
The IPv4, tunneled IPv6 over IPv4, and IPv6 traffic components are compared on this report (3 series).
Now, IPv4 is given by RPT_LUR table, IPv6 by RPT_GUR table, and the tunneled IPv6 over IPv4 is still IPv4 traffic but it is calculated through RPT_GUR table.
When plotting the net IPv4 traffic, the query takes the gross IPv4 component given by the RPT_LUR table and subtracts the tunneled IPv6 component given by the RPT_GUR table.
If these two tables have different aggregations, the subtraction will generate some negative bandwidth samples.
If the time aggregation procedure has not been applied to the RPT_LUR table or if there is no tunneled IPv6 traffic, then the report works fine.
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The Distribution report available in Malicious - Spam category does not generate any reports even though correct data is available.
This report can actually work only under the assumption that there is a SMTP service, with its relative service counter, defined for all outgoing traffic based on the SMTP protocol. This is the case if the customer is still using the SCE default service configuration.
If the customer has renamed the SMTP service or has configured other service counters to track outgoing SMTP traffic, then the report cannot work.
Additional Open Caveats
The current software release is affected by the following open issues:
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For most of reports showing a bandwidth or volume metric and supporting a change of measurement units, the plotted minor series can disappear from the chart layout when switching to a higher unit (e.g. from Kbps to Mbps).
This is due to the logic implemented on the report queries that currently make use of a FLOOR SQL-function to convert the metrics when changing units. Thus a contribution of 800 Kbps will be floored to 0 (zero) Mbps; a contribution of 1900 Kbps will be floored to 1 Mbps, etc.
In this way, all series samples below 1024 Kbps will be removed from the chart, when switching to Mbps. The same issue occurs when switching from Mbps to Gbps.
If that occurs, the operator needs to select the lowest available units of measurement to obtain accurate results.
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For some SCE reports, the Data Grid visualization on the Report Wizard does not support interactivity when changing the Traffic Direction control: once the report is generated, the shown amounts remain the same independently of the selected traffic direction.
ASR1K-related reports are not affected by this anomaly.
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On the Network Wizard, users won't be able to create a ASR1k Network and set the Master device if the ASR1K configuration contains an application group with more than 256 applications.
Workaround: It is required to configure the ASR1k device(s) to partition the list of applications into application groups with less than 256 elements.
Obtaining Documentation and Submitting a Service Request
For information on obtaining documentation, submitting a service request, and gathering additional information, see the monthly What's New in Cisco Product Documentation, which also lists all new and revised Cisco technical documentation, at:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/general/whatsnew/whatsnew.html
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Any Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and phone numbers used in this document are not intended to be actual addresses and phone numbers. Any examples, command display output, network topology diagrams, and other figures included in the document are shown for illustrative purposes only. Any use of actual IP addresses or phone numbers in illustrative content is unintentional and coincidental.
© 2011 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.
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