With the increase in network complexity, size, and associated cost, network management tools must be agile enough to keep up. In order to meet growing business needs, network management must be able to quickly react to network events as well as automatically fix or remediate problems. This is not always possible with external applications. These applications may not be able to react quickly enough to prevent critical network outages, nor do they always have the ability to connect to devices if an outage has occurred. Devices themselves must be given the intelligence and instrumentation to manage themselves from within.
Cisco IOS®-based devices have a variety of embedded management tools that can help visualize what is happening both within the device, and on the network. These tools include IP SLA, the Embedded Event Manager, Enhanced Object Tracking, and the Embedded Packet Capture. Cisco is combining these tools into its Embedded Automation Systems (EASy) initiative so that operators and administrators can better understand their network environments, quickly react to impending problems, and overall reduce the cost associated with managing today’s complex networks.
From the EASy portal you can read more about our goals, and download packages to help enhance IOS and your network management capabilities. For example, there is a package to add custom MIB objects to IOS; start an Embedded Packet Capture session at a specific time; use IP SLA to detect a remote link failure, and fail over to a redudant network path; and many others. These EASy packages are designed to be (pardon the phrase) easy for users to deploy, configure, and understand. Most come with a documentation set and an instructional video to help get you started.
If you find that there are problems you would like to solve - or solutions you would like to see implemented - let the EASy team know! Send an email to ask-easy@cisco.com.