Vistara is a multi-tenant SaaS based product that serves thousands of customers, managing a large number of devices. Vistara runs on a highly scalable Big Data platform that processes over a billion data samples per day. Vistara is architected to be scaled out on demand. To ensure that Vistara can meet real-time performance demands, the product is tested thoroughly under variety of conditions and against a wide range of devices. Specific features, like Vistara’s performance data visualization, also require in-depth testing. Vistara’s QA team previously used only physical devices in their lab for testing. With this approach, it was very difficult to test product behavior under extreme load scenarios across devices from many different vendors. To address this need, Vistara decided to augment their lab with a network simulator. Vistara needed an enterprise grade network simulator that can simulate SNMP agent behavior as well as various console protocols such SSH/Telnet in depth. They also needed a tool that came with a large library of pre-defined networks that they could use as simulated test devices. Vistara evaluated the market for an enterprise grade network simulator. MIMIC SNMP and Telnet/SSH Simulator stood out in meeting all of its requirements.

Cisco provides many applications as a part of this solution; Hosted Collaboration Fulfillment-Mediation (HCM-F), Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance, Cisco Unified Call Manage(CUCM), Cisco Unified Presence(CUP), Cisco Unity Connection(CUCxN), Cisco Unified Operation Manager (CUOM), and Cisco Prime License Manager. There are many communications technologies linking the different components: SOAP, REST, XML, SNMP, Cisco IOS, LDAP, VOIP, Telnet and SSH. They all need to be verified for various combinations of scenarios, features and scalability. That is a huge task which would need many different tools to be used and configured. Instead Cisco decided to use one tool that can provide all the test environments they need, MIMIC Web and SNMP Simulator.