Reporting on CUCM-driven video calls/adoption

[Paul McGurn]

Hi all,

I was wondering what folks are using to report on video call traffic driven through CUCM, and/or adoption of video calling vs. plain voice calling within their environments.  We evalutated Cisco Prime Collaboration, but I found it to be extremely clunky, slow, and not tailored to answer the non-cookie-cutter questions I have from day to day operations (ad hoc reporting is a challenge).

We ahve a mix of MX, EX, SX, and Jabber endpoints deployed in a distributed WAN with a centralized CUCM cluster, and all endpoints register to CUCM.

[brmeade]

Your only Cisco options are going to be RTMT or Prime Collaboration Assurance.  We'll see if anyone has any suggestions on 3rd party monitoring programs.

What type of reporting were you not able to do in Prime Collaboration?  You may be able to submit that feedback to your Cisco AM and see if they can get the features you need added in a new version.

[Paul McGurn]

Hi Brian,

Prime is too resource wasteful, for one.  Requiring an 8 core server with 16gb of RAM for a medium sized environment, and STILL being slow to navigate, was unacceptable.  I wanted a solution that made ad hoc reporting fast, and Prime isnt it.  It is also extremely expensive in the way it is licensed per endpoint, and with endpoint tiers.

There is also pushback from the business on why we would need to buy an expensive addon for the UC environment because it completely lacks usable business reporting out of the box.  They felt even more strongly about Prime Provisioning.  Having to buy a solution to make MACD's standard, easy, and fast because the Unified Communications server environment is really not 'unified' when it comes to daily administration fell upon a lot of grumbling.