Cisco Unified Intelligence Center is a comprehensive,
end-to-end reporting solution, built using Web 2.0 frameworks. It is designed
to make the task of creating reports and managing disparate data sources easier
for the customer. The Unified Intelligence Center reporting platform is intended to be a common
tool with a consistent user interface that can access data across multiple
Cisco Systems product families.
Unified Intelligence Center can be installed as a standalone server or as a cluster of a
maximum of eight server nodes. There is one mandatory publisher node (called
the Controller) and up to seven subscriber nodes (called Members). The
Controller node includes a Member; thus a deployment can consist of a
Controller only.
Unified Intelligence Center 8.0(3) reporting features include multi-user support,
customized reports, security, multiple display formats, web accessibility,
support for permalinks, and Web 2.0-like mash-up support to display data from
multiple sources on a single dashboard. These features make Unified Intelligence Center a
valuable tool in the Information Technology arsenal of any organization and
position it as a drop-in replacement or solution for most reporting
requirements.
Release 8.0(3) contains built-in (stock) reports for Cisco Unified
Contact Center Enterprise (Unified CCE) Release 8.0 and Release 8.5, and
accepts the import of reports designed for use with the 8.0(1) release of Cisco
Unified Customer Voice Portal (Unified CVP).
This section includes a basic feature list for Unified Intelligence Center Reporting.
For a comprehensive list of the report templates, their features, and their use, see User Guide for the Cisco Unified Intelligence Center Reporting
Application and the
Report Template Reference Guide For Cisco Unified Intelligence
Center.
Support for Virtualization
Unified Intelligence Center Release 8.0(3) and up supports installation of the
various Intelligence Center components on virtual machines. For more information, see
Virtualization Doc Wiki.
Reporting Capabilities
Web 2.0 based dashboard mash-ups
Powerful grid presentations of reports with sorting and
grouping
Chart and gauge presentations of reports
Association of multiple report displays with the same report
data definition
Custom filters
Custom thresholds to alert on the data
Pre-installed stock report templates for Unified CCE data
Importable report templates for Unified CVP data
Report data from JDBC compatible data sources. This release of Unified Intelligence Center supports Informix and SQL Server databases
Configure redundant data sources and to switch automatically or manually from one to other data source
Report Management
Multi-user support
Customized dashboards and custom reports
Report scheduler
Detailed security levels and support for LDAP/local
database authentication
Import and export of report XML files
Export of grid reports to Microsoft Excel
Email reports in PDF format
Export reports in CSV format to a remote location through SFTP
Report Infrastructure
Multiple language support
Clustered deployment
Management support through Simple Network Management
Protocol (SNMP), Java Management Extensions (JMX), and Cisco Analysis Manager
Cisco Unified Intelligence Center stock Unified CCE reports and
importable Unified CVP reports were qualified to extract report data from
product database versions as follows:
Unified CCE reports are present in the user interface after the
Unified Intelligence Center installation of a member node. These realtime and historical reports
are populated from the Unified CCE database.
Unified CVP reports ship with the Unified CVP installation.
Customers can import them into Unified Intelligence Center.
Note
Cisco is focused on making Unified Intelligence Center the reporting tool of choice
for all our customers and hence we are constantly working on having other
products interoperate with Unified Intelligence Center. As part of this process, when a new product
becomes compatible with Unified Intelligence Center, the information will be delivered to Cisco
customers through
http://developer.cisco.com.
Licensing
Unified Intelligence Center uses Flexlm
licensing based on the MAC address of the controller node. The license is downloaded through
the Administration console interface and is transmitted to all member nodes by replication. Changes or updates to the license are done on the controller node.
For virtual machine based deployments of Unified Intelligence Center, licenses are
based on the Licensing MAC. For more information about obtaining and installing licenses, see the
Unified IC installation guide.
For cluster deployment, the license file specifies the maximum number of Unified Intelligence Center
servers that the cluster can support. For more information about the types of available licenses, see the User documentation.
Security
Access the Unified Intelligence Center over HTTPS; users
must log in to the web application to access it.
Perform user authentication using either of the following:
LDAP based authentication
Application-specific authentication based on the local Unified Intelligence Center
database
After logging in, Security Administrator users can define access
permissions for other users based on read, execute, or write rights for the
objects they own. Role-based access policies are also enforced based on
commonly-preformed user roles.
A single identity is used to access the Unified Intelligence Center internal databases
and the other data sources from which report data is extracted. Although each
user has an individual login, the application does use multiple logins to
access the internal or external databases. Use a single, pre-configured login to access the databases irrespective of the login used.
Unified Intelligence Center supports Unified CCE user integration, where Unified CCE
supervisors can be imported into the Unified Intelligence Center application with specific,
automatically-assigned roles.
Data source servers that are deployed over WAN links are likely to
encounter firewalls.
Firewall requirements for supported databases are as follows:
Microsoft SQL Server
Default instances of SQL Server listen on TCP port 1433. Named
instances, however, dynamically assign an unused TCP port number the first time
the instance starts. The named instance can also dynamically change its TCP
port address on a later startup if another application is using the original TCP port number.
Named instances should therefore be assigned a static port using
the SQL Server Configuration Manager.
Microsoft SQL Server uses UDP port 1434 to establish communication
links from applications for its SQL Server browser service. Configure the firewall to forward all requests for UDP port 1434 on the database
server address. For more information, see this article on the MSDN
Configuring the Windows Firewall to Allow SQL Server
Access SQL server firewall configuration guide.
IBM Informix IDS
The Informix IDS server listens on a single incoming TCP port for
incoming database connections. For more information, see the Cisco Unified Intelligence Center TCP and UDP Port Usage guide on http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps9755/prod_maintenance_guides_list.html.
The TCP port can be changed depending on the application and can be found
in the services file (/etc/services on UNIX and
%WINDIR%\system32\drivers\etc\services on Windows).
For example, in Release 8.0(1), the Unified CVP Reporting Server
uses port 1526. This is the only port that must be opened on the forwarding
firewall that guards access to an Informix IDS server.
For more information, see the
IDS communication guides.
The Unified Intelligence Center throttling mechanism prevents servers from freezing
or encountering an Out-of-Memory situation when they are pushed beyond their limits.
Note
Throttling is not the same as ensuring good quality of service. If a Unified Intelligence Center deployment is
being overused, the level of service may degrade substantially before the throttling mechanism
is activated.
Memory is the resource that is actively throttled by the Unified Intelligence Center application.
Processing report data accounts for the majority of memory consumption in Unified Intelligence Center. For that
reason, memory throttling focuses on controlling memory consumption due to reporting
activity.
The report row is the basic unit used to measure the amount of
reporting activity. Using report rows as the basic unit to measure reporting activity gives
flexibility to users. A user can decide to run a few big reports or many small ones and the
throttling mechanism are equally effective without requiring any tuning.
Report rows are counted only as they are loaded into memory, so no guesses are made as to
report size. Test results using the row sizes of the installed stock reports indicate that 2
KB is a conservative estimate for the size of a report row. If each report row is 2 KB in size,
then 250,000 is the maximum number of report rows that a Unified Intelligence Center server allows into
memory before the server encounters an Out-of-Memory situation.
To enforce this limit, each Unified Intelligence Center keeps count of the number of report rows
currently loaded into memory. That count is checked by all reporting operations to determine if
additional report rows can be loaded into memory. If an operation cannot proceed because the
number of concurrent rows in memory has reached the maximum value, the operation fails and an
error is displayed to the user.
What happens if the limits are exceeded?
Report rows are loaded into
memory when the data is being fetched from the data source and when it is being prepared to be
sent to the browsers.
Either of these operations can fail if the maximum number of concurrent report
rows in memory is exceeded:
If a violation happens while Unified Intelligence Center is reading data from a data source, the report
execution aborts and the report is marked as failed. Unified Intelligence Center does not take
partial results–the system either reads all the data that a user requests or marks the
report as failed and stores none of the data.
If a violation occurs while Unified Intelligence Center is in the process of preparing the HTTPS response
for a browser (HTML of a grid, JSON string of a gauge, or XML of a chart), the request to
display the data is rejected and the user sees an error message that says the report cannot
be rendered because the server is low on resources.
Note
Do not use the throttling mechanism for any sizing purposes. The throttling
mechanism is designed to prevent an Out-of-Memory situation and hence this mechanism does not
ensure a good quality of service to the users. Always use the sizing calculator to determine
your reporting sizing needs.