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IPT Network Management Tools

Cisco IPT rides on top of the existing network infrastructure. The IPT solution includes main components such as CallManager, IP Phones, gateways, and application servers. The network infrastructure includes routers and switches. It is imperative to track the health of both IPT and network infrastructure components.

The CallManager server in a cluster handles the call-processing requests; adding IPT management software should not complicate the equation. You should select management software that can proactively monitor the voice components and generate alerts to prevent potential problems. The management software should not affect CallManager operation.

CiscoWorks and IP Telephony Environment Monitor

CiscoWorks IP Telephony Environment Monitor (ITEM) is a suite of tools that aids you in monitoring the health of your IPT system. ITEM runs on Microsoft Windows 2000 Server and Professional platforms. The main components of ITEM are CiscoWorks and IP Telephony Monitor. The plug-in modules Gateway Statistics Utility (GSU), IP Phone Information Utility (IPIU), and IP Phone Help Desk Utility (IPHDU) complete the suite of products in ITEM to monitor all the components in your IPT network. The following are the benefits of ITEM:

Proactively monitors all the voice components

Provides real-time fault information about the underlying IP fabric

Assists in gateway capacity planning

Monitors the availability of critical services using confidence testing to simulate features such as Off-Hook, TFTP, conference, phone registration, end-to-end call, Message Waiting Indicator, and emergency call test

ITEM monitors various IPT components via Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) MIB polling, SNMP trap reception HTTP and ICMP polling to collect information from different components. ITEM does not require installation of a polling or data collection agent on the CallManager. This not only eases troubleshooting CallManager issues but also provides stability to CallManager. ITEM correlates the information received, intelligently reports critical problems, and identifies whether several events from the same device are related. This reduces the number of alerts.

You can perform the device configurations, define thresholds, set or modify alerts, generate reports, and monitor gateway performances via the ITEM GUI. To access the ITEM GUI, type http://IP address:1741/loginl in your browser of choice (where IP address is the IP address of the ITEM server). Figure 9-19 shows the ITEM GUI interface.

The ITEM GUI has two important components:

IP Telephony Monitor (ITM)

Gateway Statistics

These two components appear on the left side of the browser after you log in. You have to install the GSU plug-in component for the Gateway Statistics component to show up on the ITEM GUI. The ITEM software contains the ITM component by default. The ITM component gives you the following options to choose from:

Alerts and Activities

Active Partition Selector

Device Management

Notification Services

Fault History

Configuration

IP Phone Information Facility (IPIF)

SRST Monitoring Management

IP Phone Reachability Testing

IPT Security Displays

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/cscowork/ps5431/products_user_guide_book09186a00801c1bd5l

The next section covers the following two other optional items in ITEM:

IPHDU

GSU

Alerts and Activities

The Alerts and Activities option displays the list of alerts generated by the devices that are currently monitored by ITM, as shown in RTMT Alerts" section). The alerts are summarized by device. Click on any alert to see a complete list of events associated with that alert.

Active Partition Selector

ITM allows you to group devices into multiple partitions. If you have numerous devices in your IPT network, you will likely want to use this feature. For example, if you have two CallManager clusters managed by two different groups of users, you might want to create two partitions and place the devices in different partitions according their cluster association. You can then set up user groups and give permissions in such a way that each group can control its own cluster.

Device Management

Device Management allows you to add, delete, and modify all devices that ITM monitors. It also allows you to view the device state and provides an interface to change the credentials such as SNMP community string, username, and password for the servers. You can add a single device or import devices by using a comma separated value (CSV) file. You can enter two types of devices in the ITM. One is a Network Device and the other is a Media Server. The Network device consists of all routers and switches, and the Media server consists of CallManager, Unity, Personal Assistant, CER, and CCC servers. After you add all the network devices that need to be monitored by ITM, you can use View Discovery Status to find the state of the device.

Notification Services

The Alerts and Activities option contains information on alerts that are generated because of an event. You can forward such alert information to other systems and users. There are two types of notifications:

SNMP Trap notification

E-mail notification

In configuring either notification type, you need to select the list of devices for which you want to enable the notification. As shown in Figure 9-21, you can select individual devices or a group of servers (for example, All Cisco Gateways). You can also choose to send the alert only if a critical alarm is generated from the selected device or group of devices.

By choosing different combination of these parameters, you can control the information that is sent to the individuals who are responsible for different components of the network. In other words, you can filter the information based on the job function of each recipient.

When configuring SNMP trap notification, you need to enter the SNMP trap recipient, which is the DNS name or IP address of the server that receives the trap notification. In case of E-Mail notification, the recipient information is the e-mail addresses of the intended persons to send the alert notification. You also need to specify the SMTP server information to communicate with the E-Mail server.

Fault History

Fault History allows you to view the alerts and events generated by devices that are monitored by ITM for the past 30 days. Based on the fault history, you can tell if the event or the alert is recurring or not. If you see a recurring event in the fault history, you need to analyze the reason for that event and take the appropriate steps to resolve the issue.

Configuration

Configuration allows you to configure the thresholds for various events, polling intervals, and other configuration parameters that apply to ITM. Within the Configuration display, one useful option is Confidence Testing, which is discussed in the following section.

Confidence Testing

In confidence testing, a group of synthetic traffic simulates network activity related to IPT functionality. The data collected during these tests helps you to maintain the availability of IPT; these tests provide insight into the following areas:

IP availability

SNMP availability

Application availability

Operational availability (ability of phones to connect)

Server interface availability

MWI performance

IP Phone Information Facility

In a complex network involving several switches, keeping track of the switch port to which the IP phone connects becomes hard. IPIF helps ITM to monitor, track, and maintain the phone information in the network. This utility provides information about the phone extension, IP address of the phone, MAC address of the phone, status of the phone, type of phone, protocol, SRST mode, CallManager address, switch address, switch port, switch port status, VLAN name, VLAN ID, and SRST router information. This utility helps in troubleshooting issues with phone registration when the phone moves. The switch details are populated for those switches that are managed by ITM.

Using IPIF, you can find IP Phones in the network, view details of IP Phones, schedule phone discovery, and view the status of phone discovery. You can generate individual reports of all phones in the network, unregistered suspect phones, duplicate MAC/IP address IP Phones, phone audit, phone move, and IPT applications. The IPT Applications display provides information for all IPT applications that are registered with CallManager.

SRST Monitoring Management

As discussed in Chapter 1, "Survivable Remote Site Telephony (SRST)" section, the SRST feature provides backup call processing for the IPT endpoints in the branch sites in case of connectivity failure with the CallManager at the central site.

The SRST Monitoring Management in ITM monitors the WAN link between the central site router and the branch site router configured for SRST. When the WAN link goes down, ITM sends an alert informing that IPT endpoints such as Cisco IP Phones in the branch site are in SRST mode. By viewing this alert, you can check the status of the remote WAN link and resolve the issue to restore the WAN link.

IP Phone Reachability Testing

This testing assists you in proactively monitoring the status of the IP phones. It also provides information about the availability of the intermediate network among the IP Phone, ITM, and SAA (Service Assurance Agent) router. This testing requires a router to run SAA. The SAA router sends SAA-based pings to all key phones; you can optionally configure the ITM server to send an ITM ping in addition to the SAA ping. You can use the Phone Reachability Testing Manager page to add, configure, delete, and view reachability tests.

IPT Security Displays

IPT Security Displays provides the following views:

Unregistered/Suspect IP Phones Provides information about the unregistered phone in the CallManager cluster and the phone that has made an unsuccessful attempt to register.

Duplicate MAC/IP Address IP Phones Provides information about the phones that have a duplicate MAC address or a duplicate IP address. A phone with a duplicate MAC address has the same MAC address as another IP phone in the network but a different IP address. A phone with a duplicate IP address has the same IP address as another phone in the network but a different MAC address. This report is useful during implementation and during day-to-day operations to find out configuration errors for MAC addresses.

IP Phone Audit Provides information about the addition and deletion of IP phones in the cluster and provides information about the phones when the status changes, such as when a phone becomes unregistered with CallManager.

IP Phone Move Provides information about the phones that have physically moved within the cluster and the phones that have moved between clusters. The IP Phone Movement Tracking process runs every 5 minutes to collect this information, which is stored in the database for 30 days and then purged. This interval cannot be changed.

The information collected from IPT Security Displays assists in the inventory of all phones, troubleshooting issues with call routing, and the identification of phone theft. The report contains attributes such as the phone extension, IP address of the phone, MAC address of the phone, switch address, switch port details, and the CallManager address.

IP Phone Help Desk Utility

The combination of IPHDU and IPIF constitutes a great tool for help desk personnel to troubleshoot problems with a phone. IPHDU allows help desk personnel to access IPIF without requiring them to have complete access to ITEM. IPHDU is an optional component that you can install IPHDU on any Windows platform. The help desk personnel can obtain information about the phone by using the phone extension, IP address of the phone, or MAC address of the phone. IPHDU provides the following information:

Extension number

IP address

MAC address

Switch IP address

Switch port number on that switch

Cisco CallManager IP address

VLAN information on the switch

Gateway Statistics Utility

GSU assists in collecting performance and capacity statistics from CallManagers and gateways. GSU is an optional web-based plug-in that can be installed on top of ITEM.

GSU communicates with CallManager and collects information about registered MGCP gateways. You can use GSU to schedule a study, which is a task to collect device statistics of MGCP gateways from CallManager. A study can be scheduled to run once or over a period of time; you can perform trending analyses based on the data collected over the time period.

GSU polls the Performance Monitor counters and provides the following performance statistics:

Active calls on the gateways in a cluster

FXS, FXO, T1 CAS, and T1/E1 PRI port utilization for MGCP gateways in the cluster

Channel utilization of PRIs on MGCP gateways