Q. What is Cisco® Application Visibility and Control?
A. Cisco® Application Visibility and Control (AVC) is a solution that uses multiple technologies of the Cisco ASR 1000 Series Aggregation Services Routers and Cisco Integrated Service Routers Generation 2 (ISR G2) and management tools that, when working together, provide a powerful and pervasive integrated solution for application visibility and control based on stateful deep packet inspection (DPI).
Q. How does AVC work?
A. With the Cisco AVC solution, the Cisco ASR 1000 Aggregation Service Routers and ISR G2 Routers can identify applications within the traffic flow using DPI technology. They can collect various application performance metrics such as bandwidth use, response time, and latency. Then, using Cisco industry-leading quality of service (QoS), these routers can reprioritize critical applications or enforce application bandwidth use.
Q. What technology is used in the AVC solution?
A. Cisco AVC consists of the following technologies:
• Next-generation DPI technology called NBAR2, which can identify more than 1000 applications and support application categorization, with the ability to update the protocol definition without requiring a new Cisco IOS® Software release
• Flexible NetFlow (FNF) infrastructure and NetFlow version 9 export to select and export data of interest, allowing easy consumption of application performance statistics by Cisco and third-party applications
• Cisco IOS Performance Agent (PA) to collect application response time (ART) metrics, which can be used to measure end-user experiences
• Reporting and management tools, such as Cisco Prime™ Assurance Manager, an enterprise-grade infrastructure and service monitoring tool for reporting of application and network performance, and Cisco Insight, which can provide up to 30 different reports for application visibility
• Modular QoS to facilitate optimization and control of application performance
Q. What routing platforms support AVC?
A. AVC is currently supported on the ASR 1000 Series routers and ISR G2 routers.
Q. How many applications does AVC recognize?
A. AVC currently recognizes thousands of applications, including voice/video, email, file sharing, gaming, and peer-to-peer (P2P) applications.
Q. Do we need a router reload for recognizing newer applications?
A. As of the current release of AVC, and as of Cisco IOS XE 3.5 and IOS 15.2(2)T, all the supported applications are integrated within the IOS image. Support for protocol pack updates without updating the Cisco IOS image will be offered in the future.
Q. How do I control the applications discovered with AVC?
A. QoS on the ASRs and ISR G2s is the main mechanism for control in AVC. With AVC, QoS class-map is enhanced to match the application name through match protocol <application_name> and the application category supported by NBAR2 through match protocol attribute <attribute_type>
Q. How easy is it for a customer use AVC to control P2P traffic?
A. AVC identifies more than 1000 applications, several among these being P2P applications. In addition, AVC has a special category for P2P applications, which customers can use in their QoS policies to filter on P2P.
Q. Can we slow down a particular applications?
A. Yes, AVC integration with QoS allows you to create a policy to police or shape traffic based on application knowledge.
Q. What control option do I have for my applications?
A. Through industry-leading Cisco IOS QoS, which can now operate based on the application information provided by NBAR2, users can choose to drop, police, shape, or mark application flow.
Q. Is AVC IPv6 aware?
A. Yes, AVC is IPv6 aware.
Q. What is the Cisco IOS Performance Agent (PA) component of the AVC solution?
A. IOS Performance Agent (PA) is an important component of AVC. It provides application visibility in the network through quantification of user experience on TCP flows.
PA passively monitors flows through the router to measure network delay, application delay, and server delay. The administrator can use this information to better understand application performance and bottlenecks.
Understanding this information helps the administrator better understand issues, if any, in the network and thereby identify the right tools - policy, optimization, bandwidth, and so on - to resolve the issue.
Q. Can Cisco IOS Performance Agent use the application identification capability provided by NBAR2?
A. Yes, IOS Performance Agent can use the application information provided by NBAR2 to populate the application ID field in its Flexible Netflow export.
Q. If I'm using AVC, do I still need to use the medianet functionality?
A. AVC complements medianet by providing visibility into and control over both application and media applications. AVC can coexist with medianet passive monitoring capability called performance monitoring to monitor voice or video traffic. Network administrators can view performance metrics collected by medianet performance monitoring, such as jitter or loss, through the Cisco Prime Assurance voice/video dashboard.
Q. What management tools can we use with AVC?
A. AVC supports reporting via Cisco Insight Reporter, Cisco Prime Assurance Manager, and Cisco Prime Network Analysis Module (NAM).
Q. What are the hardware requirements for using Cisco Insight with AVC?
A. Cisco Insight provides a web reporting GUI to generate traffic reports. It utilizes the Cisco Collection Manager to collect and store traffic statistics. The Collection Manager can run within the same hardware as Cisco Insight, or as a separate system. The hardware requirements for Cisco Insight and Collection Manager are documented in their installation documentation.
Q. Can AVC be used with third-party management tools?
A. The information exported by AVC is in the standard NetFlow version 9 format and certainly lends itself to use with third-party tools.
Q. Is a multitenant-capable management tool available with AVC?
A. Cisco Insight allows for multitenant reporting. Starting with version 3.1, Cisco Insight will also be VPN Routing and Forwarding (VRF) capable.
Q. What are the supported export formats?
A. AVC currently supports the Netflow version 9 export format.