Cisco Prime network and cisco prime infrastructure

[kjabhishek]

Hi,

What is the difference between Cisco Prime Network and Cisco Prime infrastructure.

Please advice.

[Marvin Rhoads]

I assume you are asking about Cisco Prime LAN Management System (LMS) vs. Cisco Prime Infrastructure (PI).

LMS is currently the leading Cisco offering for wired infrastructure management. It is the evolution of the earlier CiscoWorks LMS, CiscoWorks RWAN CiscoWorks 2000, CWSI, VLAN Director, original CiscoWorks classic etc. products going back almost 20 years.

PI is the equivalent Cisco offering for wireless LANs and is the successor to NCS and WCS products.

The overlap and confusion comes from the fact the Cisco is positioning PI as the overall wireless and wired management platform and gradually introducing wired network management features to make it equal (and eventually exceed) LMS's capabilities.

There is a comparison table here that shows the current differences. A major new release of PI (2.0) is due out shortly which will close many (but not all) of the gaps on that table.

[kjabhishek]

Hi Marvin,

Thank you very much for the information.

I am new to Cisco PI and need some information or document to explore more on snmp traps, reporting etc.. in Cisco PI.

I have checked the Cisco Prime infrastructure configuration guide and User guide, still I am not getting enough information on customized reporting, snmp traps, syslog messages, link reliability, link drop counters, jitters, BGP, EIGRP etc..

Please advice, if you know any other document which can give more information and understanding with reference to Cisco PI configuration.

[Marvin Rhoads]

PI 1.x does not do a very good job on most of the things you ask about (if at all - for instance it does not have a general purpose syslog server). You will only be frustrated trying to make it do things it's not able to do (or at least not able to do well).

I recommend you wait until PI 2.0 comes out (in a couple of weeks) and see what documenation and capabilities it offers and decide to upgrade to use them.

The other alternative is to install and use LMS (license included with PI 1.2 purchase). It does all of those things pretty well (although it might not be a good long term strategy given Cisco's product direction).

[Duong Nguyen]

It still sounds like PI2.0 and LMS will still both need to exist since PI2.0 will not a complete covergence of LMS and PI1.2

[Marvin Rhoads]

It depends. If you don't need to use any of the non-covered features, PI 2.0 may be just fine.

If you're also integrating Cisco wireless management, it will do lots that LMS won't.

I believe it will also have a few wired management features that LMS does not. (Mainly in the work centers at the bottom of the comparison chart I linked to above.)