Working with Groups, IP Domains, and Tenants in CA Performance Center › What are Groups? › Working with Cisco Trunk Groups

Working with Cisco Trunk Groups

In a Cisco environment, use trunk groups to reflect your actual usage and routing patterns in UC Monitor reports.

Trunk groups are not discovered from the call servers or from network traffic, but are instead created as groups of voice interfaces in CA Performance Center. You can see them on the CA Performance Center Inventory tab.

Create group rules that automatically place gateway voice interfaces into custom groups, which you designate as trunk groups using a clear naming convention. These special trunk groups can only contain items of the voice interface type.

Cisco administrators must periodically verify the voice interface capacity values from a device MIB. This information can be viewed on the Voice Gateway Properties page. The Voice Interface reports use the information in the Channel Capacity column to calculate interface usage as a percentage of capacity. These reports are less accurate when the device MIB incorrectly reports the gateway voice channel capacity.

As a best practice, verify that all known gateway voice interfaces have the number of channels correctly configured. The collector typically can get this capacity information from polling the gateway. If it changes, however, this information is not updated in the device MIB. To verify Cisco voice interface capacity data, see Managing Voice Gateways.

UC Monitor operators can see unexpected items in reports when you do not carefully create groups and user account permissions. Specifically, do not place gateway voice interfaces in groups that you then copy into subgroup containers. An operator with permission to view a container group can also see all its subgroups. As a result, that operator can see the same interface group twice in the Top Trunk Groups report: where it appears in its own group, and where it appears in its container group.

This behavior is unavoidable because the Trunk Group reports do not handle container groups the same way that they handle trunk groups. Specifically, only the custom groups that (directly) contain at least one voice interface are identified as trunk groups. To UC Monitor, a voice interface that belongs to a trunk group and to a subgroup is included twice in the Top Trunk Groups report. The voice interface does not appear to be a duplicate because only one instance is a member of a trunk group.

To avoid duplication of trunk groups in the Trunk Group reports, verify that trunk groups contain only voice interfaces. When a non-voice interface item is detected, the group is not handled as a trunk group. And then either:

• Do not place trunk groups into container groups that you then copy into other positions in the Groups tree.
• Assign permissions at the level of each specific trunk group, not above it, at the container level.