Monitoring the Cisco CSS

eG Enterprise provides a specialized Cisco CSS monitoring model that monitors the sessions to and services offered by the Cisco CSS, and promptly alerts administrators to deviations (if any) in performance.

Figure 1 : The layer model of the Cisco CSS

Every layer of Figure 1 is mapped to a wide variety of tests that connect to the SNMP MIB of the Cisco CSS to report useful statistics related to the health of the CSS. Using these metrics, the following questions can be easily answered:

• How many groups have been configured on CSS? Which destination services are associated with each group? What is the current state of each group service? How frequently was the group service accessed?
• Are any groups in a disabled state currently? How many users are currently connected to the enabled groups?
• Is the Cisco CSS overloaded with sessions? Which application IP has generated the maximum session activity on the CSS?
• Which owner frequently accessed the CSS?
• What are the services associated with each owner? How many of these services are currently alive?
• How many services have been configured on the CSS totally? What are they? Are any of these services dying currently? Which service has generated the maximum network traffic?
• Are the services able to process content requests well?
• What are the content rules configured on CSS? What is the current status of each content rule?
• What are the IP interfaces on CSS? Are any of them disabled or waiting for a circuit?
• How many VLAN circuits are configured on CSS?
• Has enough pool memory been allocated to the IP routing table?
• Is the CSS in a redundant state currently? What is the current state of the redundant link? Will the CSS be going into a failover soon?

The sections to come will discuss the top 4 layers of Figure 1 only, as the Network layer has already been dealt with elaborately in the Monitoring Cisco Router document.