Monitoring IP Telephony/Unified Communication
Many business start with VoIP as the first application to start there unified communication strategy. Once you have deployed unified communication, you need to continuously monitor and manage the environment. This will help you ensure agreed-upon service levels, including the availability of service and the quality of end user experience. You need
- Visibility into all the elements of unified communication, from infrastructure to data applications and IP telephony
- Assess Voice quality in real time
- Measure the end-user experience of applications
- Reduce the time to resolve incidents
Why Monitor Your VoIP Traffic?
White Paper – Monitoring Your VoIP Network
- Any changes to the underlying LAN/WAN infrastructure will now affect VoIP Performance
- Traditional Telephony (PSTN) each call is carried on a secured fixed bandwidth circuit for carrying the voice.
- Packet Switched networks are designed to carry data, which are not time-sensitive.
- With IP Telephony Voice is shared with Data as well as other voice calls over the same network
- IP networks allow each packet to independently find the most efficient path to the intended destination.
- Voice could arrive with different end-to-end delays, arrive out of sequence, or possibly not arrive at all.
Primary Challenge of Managing Unified Communication
White Paper – Bandwidth solves all problems
Maintaining the quality and consistency of voice conversation in an ever-changing network environment.
Monitoring Technology
Two areas to consider in monitoring your converged network:
Network infrastructure
The network is now the determining factor and the platform for delivery your overall Voice Qaulity. Your network must be able to support VoIP and you need to understand how you are going to monitor for changes in the network and produce reports that expose these changes daily. For more information on Network Monitoring go here
Call Quality
The second area is monitoring the user experience in real time from Off-hook to back on-hook. It is essential to gain visibility into the overall service availability, call setup process, conversation quality, speech clarity.
Three Technologies to Monitor IP Telephony
- PBX Integration
- Passive Monitoring
- Active Testing
PBX Integration
PBX Integration allows you to integrate directly with the PBX especially Cisco, Avaya and now Microsoft OCS. Each system integrates with the vendors PBX to monitor each conversation and sends the results back to the monitoring system. Should a problem occur then diagnostic software can automatically pinpoint route cause analysis.
The Solutions
Passive Monitoring
Passive monitoring- is the process of tapping into the stream of calls and picking up the voice packets to view the calls over the network. This allows you to see all the calls made by all the user. Should a QoS parameter like delay or packet loss exceed your requirement then you can send an alarm.
The Solutions
Active Testing
Active Testing - is where simulated (or synthetic) calls are placed at a specified time frequency and a MOS score is measured between strategically located points in the network.
When a threshold has been broken on the synthetic call we can send an alarm that end users may be having QoS issues
