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VoIP and Video Quality of Experience Monitoring with NetQoS Unified Communications Monitor
More than any other application suite, unified communications requires an optimal quality of experience. The combination of NetQoS Unified Communications Monitor and the NetQoS Performance Center helps you ensure both quality of experience and network quality of service.
The introduction of unified communications and VoIP presents specific challenges that can only be addressed with network-centric performance management products. Existing management products lack the metrics specific to managing unified communications services or only monitor a specific component of unified communications, such as VoIP.
NetQoS Unified Communications Monitor, the network-based voice and video monitoring module of the NetQoS Performance Center, tracks the quality of end-user experience, provides alerts on performance problems, and isolates performance issues to speed troubleshooting and MTTR. Unified Communications Monitor is integrated with the NetQoS Performance Center, so you can monitor unified communications quality of experience while managing network quality of service from a single, Web-based console.
With Unified Communications Monitor you can assess the performance of your Cisco Unified Communications Manager or Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) platforms by tracking, evaluating, and reporting on key metrics without deploying server agents or client-side probes. Within a single report, NetQoS Unified Communications Monitor displays call and video quality measurements against a baseline threshold for any network segment.
NetQoS Unified Communications Monitor provides VoIP and video quality detail for any location on the network
How will NetQoS Unified Communications Monitor Help You?
1. Ensure Unified Communications Quality of Experience
- Report on metrics associated with delivering unified communications such as jitter, latency, packet loss, and frame loss
- Provide both call quality and call setup metrics, such as Mean Opinion Score (MOS), jitter buffer loss, call setup failures, and delay to dial tone
- Provide video quality metrics such as frozen video minutes, frame loss, and latency
2. Solve Unified Communications Problems Faster
- Customize alerts and thresholds according to your needs to help pinpoint specific unified communications performance issues on the network
- Assign performance thresholds to specific pairs of network locations, pairs of gateways, or pairs of locations and gateways
- Drill down to individual network locations or gateways to quickly identify unified communications performance problems on your network
3. Evaluate Call Activity and Plan For Updates
- View capacity across the entire enterprise or for a specific location or gateway to determine busy-hour call attempts and busy-hour call completions on the network
- Provide a view of the effects of call volume on call performance and help track trends in call setup failure rates
Features
Video and Call Quality Monitoring
- Comprehensive call quality data for all calls in the system, including both IP and PSTN call legs
- Video quality metrics for video transmissions such as frozen video minutes, frame loss, and latency in Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) environments
- MOS values supplemented by associated network impairment metrics such as packet loss or jitter
- PSTN gateway call legs associated with analog metrics such as ACOM and ERL
- Call volume and interface utilization data for tracking call activity and capacity planning
Call Setup Monitoring
- Passive, centralized monitoring of signaling flows for SCCP and SIP to and from Cisco Unified Communications Manager
- Passive, centralized monitoring of signaling flows for MGCP, SIP, and H.323 for PSTN call setup
- Quality ranking based on key metrics, such as time to dial tone, post-dial delay and call failures
Troubleshooting
- Real-time, 15-second granularity, monitoring of all calls for selected phones
- Automated incident responses in the form of traps, e-mail notifications, or further investigation (e.g., traceroute)
System Features
- Customizable thresholds and threshold assignments for individual location-to-location alert levels
- Safeguards to avoid false alarms, such as alerts only when call performance problems affect a designated minimum number of voice or video transmissions
- Operations and Network Engineer views into call quality data, with separate Administrator views for configuration
- Ability to scale to monitor large numbers of phones for enterprise VoIP deployments
- Web-based interface with unlimited users-no per-seat licenses
- Integration with the NetQoS Performance Center to provide a single web-based console for managing converged networks
