Visitor contributor: Rebecca Grassing is a product advertising and marketing supervisor at Auvik. Along with her experience in community administration and SaaS, she has been serving to the Auvik staff help clients 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 sources, together with Auvik’s Annual IT Traits report.
Complete Community Visibility and Lifecycle Management with Cisco + Auvik
Throughout a current webinar, I joined Cisco Resolution 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, gadget proliferation, and contract administration, decreasing operational danger and enhancing planning accuracy throughout Cisco and multi-vendor environments.
This put up summarizes key technical insights from that dialogue. Even for those who missed the webinar, the chance to realize these insights is accessible now. You possibly can request a demo at present 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 resulting from guide processes, resulting in unidentified gadgets, undocumented configurations, and forgotten connections. At Auvik, we deal with this by implementing automated discovery mechanisms, leveraging Layer 2 and Layer 3 protocols, to map each Web Protocol (IP)-connected gadget inside your setting, together with each Cisco and non-Cisco infrastructure.
This course of generates dynamic topology maps, complete gadget inventories (together with serial numbers, working system variations, and interface particulars), and site visitors circulate insights derived from protocols like NetFlow or sFlow. These knowledge 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 gadgets.
- Granular monitoring of bandwidth utilization and application-specific site visitors patterns.
Proactive Lifecycle Administration: Mitigating Finish-of-Life Dangers
Auvik integrates immediately with Cisco Utility Programming Interfaces (APIs) to retrieve crucial lifecycle knowledge to your community infrastructure. This knowledge consists of Finish-of-Sale (EoS) and Finish-of-Upkeep (EoM) dates, help contract standing, and firmware model info.
This integration offers exact visibility into gadgets 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 weak gadgets primarily based on producer lifecycle knowledge.
- Prioritization of {hardware} and software program upgrades aligned with lifecycle levels and help contracts.
- Technology of detailed evaluation stories 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, similar to latency spikes, packet loss, extreme bandwidth utilization, and interface errors. Our platform additionally helps the definition of customized alerts primarily based on particular operational thresholds. Monitoring is carried out utilizing industry-standard protocols similar to 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 gadget particulars, enabling speedy root trigger evaluation. Historic efficiency knowledge is retained, permitting for development evaluation and the identification of anomalous patterns earlier than they influence end-users.
Technical Capabilities:
- Proactive alerting triggered by precise community state modifications and efficiency deviations.
- Accelerated difficulty decision by way of real-time contextual knowledge.
- Discount in Imply Time To Decision (MTTR) and operational escalation quantity.
Compliance-Prepared Documentation and Configuration Management
Auvik facilitates steady documentation of your community setting. This consists of detailed gadget configurations, historic change logs, and firmware states, supported by automated 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 person or course of. This functionality strengthens audit posture for compliance frameworks (e.g., PCI DSS, ISO 27001) and considerably reduces the danger related to undetected misconfigurations.
Technical Capabilities:
- Instantaneous export of stock and configuration knowledge for compliance reporting.
- Upkeep of a complete, version-controlled change historical past for all managed gadgets.
- Streamlined help for regulatory compliance frameworks by way of automated documentation.
Optimized for Cisco Environments, Supported by Consultants
Deploying Auvik by way of a Cisco accomplice gives distinct benefits. From my perspective, these companions possess deep experience in Cisco infrastructure and may successfully combine Auvik’s insights with current Cisco lifecycle providers and help buildings.
Cisco companions can present:
- Alignment of refresh suggestions with particular Cisco help timelines and product roadmaps.
- Integration of Auvik alerts into current IT Service Administration (ITSM) platforms and ticketing methods.
- Accelerated deployment and tailor-made monitoring configurations optimized to 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’ll be able to:
- Carry out complete discovery of all energetic gadgets in a stay manufacturing setting.
- Establish Finish-of-Life (EoL) {hardware}, together with gadgets previous their EoS or EoM dates, and pinpoint firmware vulnerabilities.
- Generate a data-driven refresh roadmap primarily based on real-time stock and lifecycle knowledge.
Request your demo from the Cisco Market at present to see these capabilities in motion.
We imagine this answer offers the important visibility and management required for contemporary community operations.
We’d love to listen to what you assume. Ask a Query, Remark Under, and Keep Related with #CiscoPartners on social!
Cisco Companions Fb | @CiscoPartners X | Cisco Companions LinkedIn
