Visitor contributor: Rebecca Grassing is a product advertising and marketing supervisor at Auvik. Together with her experience in community administration and SaaS, she has been serving to the Auvik workforce help prospects and MSPs for 5 years now. Rebecca has a background in advertising and marketing know-how, publishing, and the humanities, and has authored a number of key ebooks and assets, together with Auvik’s Annual IT Traits report.
Whole Community Visibility and Lifecycle Management with Cisco + Auvik
Throughout a current webinar, I joined Cisco Answer Engineer Cristian Perissinotto to debate the tangible advantages of automated community visibility and lifecycle management. We highlighted how the Cisco and Auvik partnership addresses crucial challenges like community complexity, machine proliferation, and contract administration, decreasing operational danger and enhancing planning accuracy throughout Cisco and multi-vendor environments.
This submit summarizes key technical insights from that dialogue. Even for those who missed the webinar, the chance to achieve these insights is on the market now. You’ll be able to request a demo at this time by way of the Cisco Market to discover this answer and get your technical questions answered stay: Request a demo.
From Guide Stock to Actual-Time Topology
Conventional community documentation usually suffers from inaccuracies because of guide processes, resulting in unidentified units, undocumented configurations, and forgotten connections. At Auvik, we handle this by implementing automated discovery mechanisms, leveraging Layer 2 and Layer 3 protocols, to map each Web Protocol (IP)-connected machine inside your surroundings, together with each Cisco and non-Cisco infrastructure.
This course of generates dynamic topology maps, complete machine inventories (together with serial numbers, working system variations, and interface particulars), and visitors stream insights derived from protocols like NetFlow or sFlow. These information factors are up to date in actual time, eliminating documentation discrepancies and decreasing blind spots throughout incident response and troubleshooting.
Technical Capabilities:
- Automated visualization of community connections and interdependencies.
- Identification of unmanaged, unauthorized, or misconfigured units.
- Granular monitoring of bandwidth utilization and application-specific visitors patterns.
Proactive Lifecycle Administration: Mitigating Finish-of-Life Dangers
Auvik integrates instantly with Cisco Software Programming Interfaces (APIs) to retrieve crucial lifecycle information on your community infrastructure. This information contains Finish-of-Sale (EoS) and Finish-of-Upkeep (EoM) dates, help contract standing, and firmware model data.
This integration offers exact visibility into units nearing their Finish-of-Life (EoL) standing, figuring out {hardware} or software program requiring firmware updates, and highlighting potential help contract gaps. This proactive intelligence facilitates strategic budgeting and useful resource allocation, serving to you shift from reactive {hardware} alternative to a data-driven refresh cycle.
Technical Capabilities:
- Identification of unsupported or susceptible units based mostly on producer lifecycle information.
- Prioritization of {hardware} and software program upgrades aligned with lifecycle phases and help contracts.
- Era of detailed evaluation experiences for compliance audits and capital expenditure planning.
Automated Monitoring and Contextual Alerting
Auvik incorporates over 50 pre-configured alerts designed to detect widespread efficiency and availability points, reminiscent of latency spikes, packet loss, extreme bandwidth utilization, and interface errors. Our platform additionally helps the definition of customized alerts based mostly on particular operational thresholds. Monitoring is carried out utilizing industry-standard protocols reminiscent of Easy Community Administration Protocol (SNMP), Home windows Administration Instrumentation (WMI), and Command Line Interface (CLI) polling.
Every alert is contextually linked to the stay community map and particular machine particulars, enabling fast root trigger evaluation. Historic efficiency information is retained, permitting for development evaluation and the identification of anomalous patterns earlier than they affect end-users.
Technical Capabilities:
- Proactive alerting triggered by precise community state adjustments and efficiency deviations.
- Accelerated problem decision by way of real-time contextual information.
- Discount in Imply Time To Decision (MTTR) and operational escalation quantity.
Compliance-Prepared Documentation and Configuration Management
Auvik facilitates steady documentation of your community surroundings. This contains detailed machine configurations, historic change logs, and firmware states, supported by computerized backups and model management.
Within the occasion of an unauthorized or sudden configuration change, our platform offers a transparent audit path, detailing what was modified, when the change occurred, and by which consumer or course of. This functionality strengthens audit posture for compliance frameworks (e.g., PCI DSS, ISO 27001) and considerably reduces the chance related to undetected misconfigurations.
Technical Capabilities:
- Instantaneous export of stock and configuration information for compliance reporting.
- Upkeep of a complete, version-controlled change historical past for all managed units.
- Streamlined help for regulatory compliance frameworks by way of automated documentation.
Optimized for Cisco Environments, Supported by Specialists
Deploying Auvik by way of a Cisco companion presents distinct benefits. From my perspective, these companions possess deep experience in Cisco infrastructure and may successfully combine Auvik’s insights with present Cisco lifecycle providers and help constructions.
Cisco companions can present:
- Alignment of refresh suggestions with particular Cisco help timelines and product roadmaps.
- Integration of Auvik alerts into present IT Service Administration (ITSM) platforms and ticketing techniques.
- Accelerated deployment and tailor-made monitoring configurations optimized on your operational necessities.
Actionable Intelligence for Community Operations
Auvik delivers a exact and actionable overview of your community’s present state and future necessities. We’ve designed the answer in order that inside a brief deployment window, you may:
- Carry out complete discovery of all lively units in a stay manufacturing surroundings.
- Determine Finish-of-Life (EoL) {hardware}, together with units previous their EoS or EoM dates, and pinpoint firmware vulnerabilities.
- Generate a data-driven refresh roadmap based mostly on real-time stock and lifecycle information.
Request your demo from the Cisco Market at this time to see these capabilities in motion.
We consider this answer offers the important visibility and management required for contemporary community operations.
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