Cisco Unified Border Element (CUBE)
Cisco Unified Border Element (CUBE) is an integrated Cisco IOS enterprise Session Border Controller (SBC). It's feature set facilitates connectivity between independent unified communications, voice over IP (VoIP), and video networks.
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- Security - SBCs protect against Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed DoS (DDoS) attacks, safeguard against toll fraud and service theft, and provide media and signaling encryption to ensure confidentiality and protect against impersonation/masquerade
- Multivendor interoperability - SBCs normalize SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) signaling stream headers and messages to mitigate multivendor incompatibilities
- Protocol interworking - SBCs enable interworking between different protocols or capabilities such as H.323-SIP interworking, SIP normalization, DTMF type conversion, payload type conversion, IPv4-IPv6 interworking, transcoding.
- Quality of Service (QoS) - SBCs enforce call admission control (CAC) policies, Type of Service (ToS) marking, or rate limiting for service quality assurance
- Session routing - SBCs route sessions across network interfaces to ensure high availability or enable least cost routing (LCR)
VSM and CUBE System Health
VSM collects and stores configuration, capacity and availability information relating to the consumption of all essential CUBE resources. This data is mined at all levels. It stores this information for reporting, trending and analytical purposes. VSM specifically targets critical areas in CUBE that indicate business-impacting issues.
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- To enable IT teams to proactively identify potential issues and prevent outages
- To provide real time view of overall CUBE health at glance without having to rely on end-user reporting problems
- In the event of a service-impacting incident to significantly reduce Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) and therefore to reduce the impact on business operations by quickly identifying the root cause
General System Health
Cisco CUBEs use IOS-XE (Linux based OS). IOS-XE Process separation allows use of multiple HW or multi-core.
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VSM monitors the Control Plane processor and memory, and this is displayed in dashlet as Proc CPU & Memory. Likewise, the Data Plane is shown as Platform CPU & Memory.
Network Connectivity
Network connectivity shows the response time based on a ping requests sent to the equipment. Failed ping tests will result in an alarm being raised. Criteria defining ping failure is flexible, and is set in Network Connectivity configuration settings
Network Interface
Network Interface shows the number of interfaces configured and their status, the drill down shows detailed information about the interface including Mac address, speed, transmitted and received packets, discards and any errors.
Alerts will highlight when any of interfaces is down.
Dial-Peer Summary
Dial Peers identify call source and destination endpoints and define the characteristics that are applied to each call leg in a a call connection.
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Amber - If Only Admin or Operate State is down.
Call Legs
VSM monitors the number of active call legs per protocol:
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