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TBD: Customer facing Cisco System Health Dashlet Documentation

Cisco Unified Border Element (CUBE)

Cisco Unified Border Element (CUBE) is an integrated Cisco IOS enterprise session border controller Session Border Controller (SBC). It's feature set facilitating 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 Type of service 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 Cisco CUBE that indicate business-impacting issues.

If any changes are made to the architecture, the dashboard will automatically reconfigure itself to measure and display critical capacity data based on the current configuration.

 Items monitored include not only server processor, but also essential aspects of the configuration which have their own specific requirements and capacity limitations. This information is presented by way of several different dashboards within Service Desk.
The purpose of the dashboards is three-fold:

• 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.

CUBE Architrcture has Dataplane and ControlPlaneArchitecture includes a Data plane and Control Plane.

VSM monitors the control plane Control Plane processor and memory, and this is displayed in dashlet  (dashlet as Proc CPU & Memory) and data plane (.  Likewise, the Data Plane is shown as Platform CPU & Memory) and refresh the data every 5 minutes. .  

Network Connectivity

Network connectivity shows the response time based on a ping requests sent to the equipment.  An alarm is raised based on the Equipment Location 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 details detailed information about (Interface the interface including Mac address, Speed speed, Transmitted transmitted and received packets, discards and any Errors)errors.

Alerts will highlight when any of interfaces is down.

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Environment

VSM monitors CUBE environmental factors including voltage, temperature, power supply and fans. The dashlet displays the total number of monitored environmental components summarized based on their health status.

Alerts will be highlighted as red and amber based on the potential impact:

Red - If any of environmental states are critical, shutdown or not functioning. 

Amber  - If any of environmental states are warning.

Drilling down into the environment tab will show the following details of each components:

Environment Voltage State

• State -  Displays the state of associated instance
• Value - Display the current value of the associated instance 
• Description  - Description of associated instance
• Low Threshold - The lowest voltage that the associated instance of the object may obtain before an emergency shutdown of the managed device is initiated
• High Threshold -  The highest voltage that the associated instance of the object may obtain before an emergency shutdown of the managed device is initiated
• Last Shutdown -  The voltage value of the associated instance of the object at the time an emergency shutdown of the managed device was last initiated

Environment Temperature State

• State -  State of associated instance
• Value -  Current value of associated instance
• Description  - Description of associated instance
• Threshold -  The highest temperature  that the associated instance may obtain before an emergency shutdown of the managed device is initiated
• Last Shutdown -  The temperature value of the associated instance of the object at the time an emergency shutdown of the managed device was last initiated

Environment Supply State

• State -  State of associated power supply
• Description  - Description of associated power supply
• Source  -  The power supply source

Environment Fan State

• State -  State of associated fan
• Description  - Description of associated fan

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.

VSM monitors the following state for the dial peers and update the state accordingly every 3 minutes.:

• Admin State  -  Administrative state of the dial peer .
• Operate State  - Operational state of the dial peer
• Keep Alive  -  Monitor Monitors the SIP trunk status through the use of SIP Options 

VSM also display displays the configuration of each of the dial peers which help helps IT team teams to rapidly identify the source of the problem and any problems. This reduces the impact to the business if any when any of dial peers is are down.

Alerts will be highlighted as red and orange amber based on the impact and currently it has the following logic:

Red - If Admin State & Operate State are  both Administrative state  is Up & Operational state is down or the Keep alive Alive is in a busy out of service state.

OrangeAmber  - If Only both Admin or state and Operate State is down.

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DSCP

SIP Response Messages

See current volumes for

• 1xx Response
• 2xx Response
• 3xx Response
• 4xx Response
• 5xx Response 
• 6xx Response 

Call Legs

VSM monitors  the number of active call legs per protocol and update the dashlet  every 1 minute.:

• Supported Protocols
  • H323
  • SIP
  • MGCP
  • SCCP
  • Multicast
  • CA Control
  • Telephony

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