Cisco Unified Operations Manager v Cisco Service Monitor

Question

I am unfamiliar with both od these products. Both seem to overlap in that they seem to aim for end to end voice quality management, relying on the 1040 probe.
Am I off base here? Are they similar products, one or both maybe OEM'd???
Are they widely deployed?
Any thoughts welcome.
Regards

Answer 1

Hi Gordon,
They are very much complimentary. In fact, installing OM used to install SM by default on same box.
OM doesn't collect info from the 1040 probes. SM does this, and then alerts to OM if thresholds are breached.
OM will then display the alert.
Operations Manager is very much about actively monitoring the health of the UC environment. Here's a couple of practical examples of what it does:
- Maps out a logical view of the environment
- Performs scheduled tests - checks CM reg, dial tone, TFTP
- Simulates calls with both synthetic phones and even real phones
- Interactive tests - check phone features are working etc
- Performance management - view utilisation of GW's CM's etc.
- IP SLA - simulated calls, jitter testing across the network using routers / switches and IP SLA features
- Alert monitoring - dashboard view
Service Monitor is very focussed on measuring the actual user experience of calls.
- It can use CDR / CMR records (with no 1040 HW sensors deployed) to record, and monitor the quality of individual calls
- It can also use the 1040 HW sensors to collect more granular call quality details.. (it sends the details to SM via syslog constantly)
- Report and alert on call quality based on thresholds (Alerts are sent to OM and appear in your alerts window)
The only real overlap I would say is that OM does some quality tests with IP SLA, but it is based on synthetic calls rather than working with data about real calls.
There is also another module, Unified Service Statistics Monitor, I'd recommend looking at this too, it provides the historical component, and also a variety of different reporting - including service levels and executive style dashboards.
I've done a few deployments. Standard network management principles apply, and I think this is where a lot of them fall down. No product can manage your network for you automatically, the biggest part is people and process. Once you have this in place you can definitely use products like OM, SM to automate and simplify.
The larger and more complex your network, the more valuable and useful these products can become.
My recommendation is to get the eval copy, and try them out. You do need to think carefully about what you want to achieve though, without this step, an install of these products probably won't impress. The art is all about the setup.
Cheers,
Tim