Introduction

Cisco Prime™ Provisioning is a management solution for network provisioning and diagnostics that automates complex tasks using policy-driven workflows to produce consistent and reliable service deployments. Cisco Prime Provisioning does this by planning, provisioning, and auditing services across core, aggregation, access, and edge devices.

Cisco Prime Provisioning is Cisco’s go-forward solution for service providers and other organizations that require carrier-grade capabilities for planning, implementing, and diagnosing network services. Cisco Prime Provisioning is the evolution of Cisco IP Solution Center (ISC) and includes all of the powerful capabilities of that offering combined with significant enhancements to the user interface, to adding and updating devices and technologies, and to extending the powerful diagnostic workflows.
 

Product Overview

Cisco Prime Provisioning accelerates deployment and time to market of Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) and Carrier Ethernet technologies. In addition, Cisco Prime Provisioning provides unique capabilities for planning and provisioning for Cisco MPLS Traffic Engineering (MPLS-TE)-enabled routers.  Cisco Prime Provisioning includes an automated decsion treee and an analysis-based network management module that troubleshoots and diagnoses a wide range of problems in MPLS virtual private networks (VPNs).
 
Cisco Prime Provisioning accelerates deployments by making design, fulfillment, and diagnosis of network services fast and efficient.  Cisco Prime Provisioning lowers total cost of ownership (TCO) by using predefined pollicies for automating core processes, making it possible for operators to provision, diagnose, and repair service problems rapidly.  In addition, Cisco Prime Provisioning helps reduce operational costs by providing automated workflow-based troubleshooting and diagnostic capabillities for MPLS VPNs.  Refer to Figures 1 and 2.)  Cisco Prime Provisioning is offered both stanalone or as a component of Cisco Prime for IP Next Generation Networks (NGN), a comprehensive end-to-end network management solution that drastically simplifies the design, provisioning, and management of carrier-grade networks.
 
Features
Cisco Prime Provisioning provides service providers and enterprises requiring carrier-grade networks with key capabilities for the activation and assurance of Layer 3 and Layer 2 VPNs.  Any Transport over MPLS (AToM), and Carrier Ethernet services. 
 
MPLS VPN Management - Cisco Prime Provisioning makes service activation quick and predictable by automating the provisioning, configuration, and fucntional audits of MPLS VPNs using predefined service profiles.
 
Layer 2 VPN and Carrier Ethernet Management - Cisco Prime Provisioning accelerates the deployment of Layer 2 VPNs and Carrier Ethernet services through automated provisioning. Deployments are validated through automated service configuration and functional audits for Carrier Ethernet VPNs.  AToM VPNs, Radio Access Network (RAN) Backhaul, and MPLS Transport Profile (MPLA-TP) netowrks.
 
MPLS VPN Troubleshooting - Cisco Prime Provisioning significantly reduces the amount of time required to diagnose MPLS-related network outages - in many cases from hours to minutes.  It achieves this through an automated, workflow-based troubleshooting and diagnosis mechanism.
 
MPLS Traffic Engineering Management - Cisco Prime Provisioning helps meet stringent service-level agreement (SLA) requirements for voice and video traffic by providing an optional solution for managing the configuration of Cisco MPLS Traffic Engineering tunnels including:
 - Autoroute Announce
 - Auto-Bandwidth
 - DiffServ-Aware Traffic Engineering
 - Fast Reroute (FRR)
Cisco Prime Provisioning Traffic Engineering managment computes and configures primary tunnels to meet user-specified constraints and computes FRR bypass tunels for network element protection (node, links, or shared-risk link groups (SRLGs)), helping to ensure connectivity and bandwidth.
 
MPLS Transport Profile (MPLS-TP) Management - Cisco Prime Provisioning significantly reducst the complexity and time to provision MPL-TP-based services by discovering MPLS-TP -enabled devices as well as calculating and visually displaying the working and protected paths in the network.  The design, path calculation, and the provisioning and audit of MPLS-TP tunnels are provided through a single automated process.
 
Asynchronous Device Updates - Cisco Prime Provisioning accelerates the time to market of new services through asynchronous device updates (ADUs), providing day-1 support of new or enhanced devices.  The new extensible Cisco Prime Provisioning engine helps enable the rapid development and distribution of device support without the need for software upgrades.
 
Integration to Operations Support Systems- Cisco Prime Provisioning APIs faciliate the integration with service provider operation support systems (OSSs) such as Cisco Info Center and IBM Tivoli Netcool.  These APIs, using an HTTP/HTTPS/Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) request/response system inerface, provide a mechanism for inserting, retrieving, updating, and removing data from Cisco Prime Provisioning.
 
Benefits
  • Enables users to dispense with the GUI and provides integration to order management systems (`flow-through provisioning')
  • Provides a dependable documented interface to query the Cisco Prime Provisioning database
    • Used by Assurance, Inventory and Performance components of OSS suites to enrich the data available to users of those systems e.g. Infovista, eHealth, Smarts, CIC
  • Enables in-depth reports to be run against the Cisco Prime Provisioning database.
Components
The main components of the Cisco Prime Provisioning API are:
  • Client:The OSS client program.
  • HTTP/HTTPS Server: A standard HTTP/HTTPS Tomcat server to process the HTTP/HTTPS binding information.
  • SOAP Plug-In: A standard Apache SOAP plug-in.
  • API Server/Servlet: Receives SOAP messages and removes the SOAP encoding.
  • API Notification Server: Used for asynchronous notifications for database change events. Cisco Prime Provisioning learns of events that occur using the Tibco Event Bus.
  • Processing Servers:The servers that perform the specific processing activities.
  • Database:The Cisco Prime Provisioning repository.
  • XML validation schema(s) and metadata:Validation files for the XML encoded data

Cisco Prime Provisioning API

Click to enlarge the diagram below which illustrates the architecture of Cisco Prime Fulfillment API