In collaboration with Fernando Quintanilla, Ervin Carrillo, and German Cheung
We work from nearly wherever. Espresso outlets, airplanes, kitchen tables. The character of our work is hybrid and once we aren’t in shared areas with our colleagues, we depend on our collaboration suite to maintain us related. Because the collaboration chief for video endpoints throughout Cisco, my day revolves fairly closely round Webex and delivering constant collaboration experiences to Webex customers.
As we work the world over utilizing collaboration instruments each internally and externally, managing that have is changing into extra complicated. With earlier instruments, studying when, the place, and why our collaboration providers, gadgets, or functions faltered was like looking for a rogue brace in 100,000 traces of code. Shortly after we migrated to our Cisco Collaboration Assembly Rooms Cloud answer, we started engaged on Webex Management Hub. Ever since, we’ve change into smarter about pinpointing these rogue braces.
Management Hub is a centralized collaboration administration portal that provides troubleshooting, analytics and compliance capabilities for our collaboration portfolio. We’ve got a number of providers, like Webex Conferences, Webex App, Webex Gadgets, Webex Calling, and with Management Hub, we get to see what’s occurring throughout the board in the environment. In a phrase, it’s superb.
Diving into Webex information to troubleshoot
Up to now, let’s say Fernando referred to as to escalate a connection situation he had with Webex Conferences. We’d have to attend on Cisco Technical Help Heart (TAC) to get backend Webex information and ship it our means. Then, we’d go down a rabbit gap attempting to pinpoint the problem, pulling info from completely different sources whereas attempting to piece collectively an image of what went unsuitable. In the meantime Fernando is pissed off he can’t be part of calls. It’s affecting his work productiveness. It’s not nice for enterprise.
Right this moment, when Fernando says he has an issue, we discover it shortly. Management Hub populates a single dashboard with information from our complete surroundings, from facets like customers, gadgets, locations, and providers. Management Hub visually organizes that information to point out me the place Fernando is having points, whether or not it’s a community situation, or a free cable on his Cisco Webex Desktop Professional system. It’s a user-friendly interface, and straight away, I spot when Fernando’s name is disrupted, for the way lengthy, what his bandwidth was, his latency – I get all the image, not items.
If Fernando was on a convention name on the time of his connection situation, Management Hub provides up assembly info in a single view. All of the individuals, the varieties of endpoint purchasers they’re utilizing, the assembly kind, how lengthy it takes to hitch the assembly, and community statistics of the decision are seen. As an admin, becoming a member of the decision to guage it in actual time and troubleshoot reside is an possibility.
In Management Hub, we pull logs from a tool, whether or not it’s on the community or not. We adjust to information privateness in each area, and whereas we are able to’t see all the pieces, alerts and a few diagnostics pop up, which is at all times higher than nothing. We get far more troubleshooting capabilities for gadgets that aren’t on the community.
When viewing the logs, the straightforward dashboard stories when modifications occur, and this info is collected. It narrows down the sector of what’s going on when a consumer says, ‘my system isn’t working’.
I’ve helped Fernando inside a couple of minutes as an alternative of some hours. With analytics, I’ve recognized if this can be a explicit sample different customers could also be having and proactively monitor or alert them earlier than it turns into a problem. Management Hub allows us to be extra environment friendly, extra resilient, and extra centered on offering an distinctive collaboration expertise.
Successful with consumer and system administration
Managing hundreds of gadgets and customers comes with its personal nuances, to not point out safety safety challenges. Management Hub simplifies provisioning, authentication, and authorizing customers on our Webex platform. We make sure that solely efficiently authenticated customers are accessing areas and providers they’re meant to, utilizing Key Administration Service (KMS) – which means unauthorized customers won’t be able to hitch your calls or areas.
As soon as customers are added, we handle their providers and settings from Management Hub. This makes onboarding a lot extra easy. When new hires be part of Cisco, they flip their laptops on, check in, and get straight to work assembly their new colleagues. When workers refresh their laptops or purchase a brand new system, they don’t must undergo a protracted migration or setup. They log in, authenticate with Single Signal-On and Duo, and it really works. We obtain system logs and push configuration modifications to gadgets as effectively. It helps us make the collaboration expertise higher for everybody.
We additionally run proactive scripts that assist us monitor gadgets frequently. These scripts carry out audits on the gadgets for standing, and if one thing pops up a few occasions, we open a case. The explanation we do that is to be sure that the gadgets in our demo facilities and workplaces are working to specification. Which means, if Sam walks right into a convention room in San Jose one week and into Bangalore one other, her expertise of the gadgets is constant, regardless of the place she is on the planet.
Simplified help and APIs
A variety of inside growth went into simplifying the bot creation course of with BotLite, a bot-making platform powered by MindMeld and Webex Groups. Utilizing bots transforms a lot of our work by way of how we’re capable of higher help our consumer base and the way our consumer base turns into extra comfy with self-service.
German Cheung, a Cisco technical techniques engineer, has developed numerous instruments by way of Webex Bots that add loads of worth to our providers. The BVE Assist bot, for instance, supplies numerous instruments to our multi-tiers help groups primarily based on their roles with out breaking up the role-based entry permission in Management Hub. With the clever workflows and automations constructed into the bot, our help groups can work together with the bot to test, diagnose, pinpoint, and repair the problems in a couple of clicks. The bot helps to standardize the procedures of analysis, troubleshooting, validation and fixing. It additionally helps to scale back human intervention and the misconfiguration attributable to human errors. MTTR (Imply Time to Restore) has decreased considerably. The bot remediates points attributable to entry permissions, case escalations, and repeated steps. For instance, one bot software, UCM Calling Enablement in Webex, completes all checks throughout a number of infrastructures and providers, and fixes points robotically in about 15 seconds. Manually, that process often takes wherever from a number of minutes to a number of hours. The bot resolves instances shortly and extra importantly, the consumer expertise is that a lot better.
Quite a lot of info comes from numerous contributing platforms that assist us make calls, launch functions, and develop bots. After we consider Webex, it’s not solely about video endpoints and Webex conferences. We even have Webex apps that encourage engagement or streamline our workspaces too, like Miro, Slido, and M365. We handle these configurations inside Management Hub.
Cisco IT has a tradition of growing artistic options. Webex has an open structure; it means that you can develop your personal answer. If we don’t provide it, it means the APIs are there if you must develop one thing, simply on your firm and your customers.
Needles in haystacks are painful and pointless
Is there a technique to keep away from twenty-questions when a senior chief says, ‘my system isn’t working’? Sure. What about when a consumer encounters dropped calls in Webex? Certain. Information is a lovely factor when it’s used insightfully. Whereas it’s nonetheless a piece in progress, Management Hub offers us extra time to make an awesome collaboration experiences even higher – and with distinctive help.
Do you could have a Management Hub story? We’d love to listen to it.
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