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.

Session border controllers (SBCs), such as Cisco CUBE, manipulate IP communications signaling and media streams, providing a variety of functions including:

• 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.

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 Architecture includes a Data plane and Control Plane.

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.  An alarm is raised based on the Equipment Location Network Connectivity configuration settings

Network Interface 

Network Interface shows the number of interfaces configured and their status , the drill down shows details information about (Interface Mac address , Speed , Transmitted and received packets ,discards and any Errors).

Alerts will highlight when any of interfaces is down.

 Network Interface Status with Alerts and drill down page

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 the SIP trunk status

VSM also display the configuration of each dial peers which help IT team to identify the source of the problem and the impact to the business if any when any of dial peers is down.

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

Red - If Admin State & Operate State are  both down or Keep alive in busy out state.

Orange  - If Only Admin or Operate State is down.

Dial Peer Summary with Alerts and drill down page

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

                                               Cisco CUBE dashlet