Cisco and Concord address key service-level issue

The current state of the industry typically requires the network manager to provide some level of manual correlation and report roll-up in order to report service availability, performance or response for a service that is supported by both the enterprise network support staff as well as external service providers. Typical service examples include company Web site access from the Internet community, an in-house remote access VPN or even branch to branch connectivity that is supported over a public Frame Relay network. The manual correlation is required because the products that support service level roll-up for the private and public portions of the network are typically different products produced by different vendors, each with their own user interface, management data roll-up and service reporting engines.

This current dearth of support is one of the reasons why I find a recent announcement from Cisco and Concord to be a good first step. Under the terms of the agreement, Cisco will support access to product MIB extensions for Customer Premise Equipment (CPE), Point of Presence (POP) and Core Backbone products that provide an improved degree of statistical support for calculating both network response time and packet loss information. Many of these MIB extensions are part of its recently announced Response Time Reporter extensions to IOS.

Example CPE products include offerings such as the 800 and 1600 access routers. Representative POP products include the 7500 and 12000 high-end routers. Core backbone switches include the products such as the TGX 8750.

As opposed to the more traditional approach in which devices are individually polled in order to gather the required data, Network Health will access the product data maintained by the Cisco WAN Manager module of the Cisco Service Management System. It can then produce either roll-up or more detailed statistical reports that service providers can then use as the basis of service-level reporting that they provide to their users. Those service provider users that have already implemented Network Health for enterprise network service level reporting should benefit from the improved service level reporting consistency between the public and private domains.

The unfortunate part of this announcement is that it is too early to determine how effective this shared usage of a Cisco and Concord product in the public and private domains will actually work. If nothing else, however, this announcement does show that vendors are taking user requirements concerning improved consistency between public and private service level management reporting seriously. Over the course of the coming year both users and service providers will have the opportunity to prove, with their capital dollars, how successful this approach might actually be.