Fluke Networks has made realtime VoIP diagnostics, including call-by-call Quality of Service tracking, now part of its OptiView Link Analyzer and Protocol Expert network monitoring and analysis solution.
Network managers can now see all levels of VoIP activity on their network, claims the company, from very broad-based call volume and call quality to individual call channel details. This allows realtime identification, isolation and repair of call quality issues.
"Voice over IP is one of the most mission-critical applications being deployed by corporations around the globe," says Robert Finlay, Fluke Networks product manager. "Yet many IT managers cannot check to see if their existing infrastructure will support VoIP, and even fewer have a plan for managing VoIP once it is deployed. Without useful monitoring and troubleshooting solutions like the new versions of OptiView Link Analyzer and OptiView Protocol Expert, call quality may cause nothing but user complaints and frustration."
The VoIP analysis features in OptiView Link Analyzer provide a realtime view of call volume and Quality of Service (QoS) for instantaneous identification of trends leading to call degradation. This enables troubleshooting before end-users are impacted. Additionally, this information can be used to track down misconfigurations in network infrastructure, says Fluke Networks, while its realtime capabilities provide a continuous vision of VoIP call quality in dynamic, changing network environments.
The VoIP capabilities in Protocol Expert and Link Analyzer make it easy to view VoIP traffic in aggregate, by call or in detail by channel. According to the company, while other protocol analyzers provide only VoIP decodes, the OptiView Protocol Expert tracks packets on a call-by-call basis while measuring important characteristics, such as jitter, dropped packets, set-up and latency. This, combined with an intuitive user interface, makes it easy to access detailed information about call quality and convert these measurements into the most widely used metric for VoIP QoS, a Mean Opinion Score (MOS).
VoIP specific alarms trigger on dropped calls, set-up failures, jitter, dropped packets and QoS metrics. This alerts the network manager to VoIP issues before end users call a help desk. Support for SCCP, SIP, H.323 and MGCP signalling protocols ensures all call types can be tracked and analysed. If the quality of calls is suspect, network administrators can play back both channels of a VoIP conversation encoded with the most common CODECs, including G.711, G.723.1 and G.729A/B.
OptiView Link Analyzer measures VoIP packets along the network, compared to other techniques that only report data generated at the end points, usually a phone or gateway. Using these live VoIP measurements, Link Analyzer lets IT staff isolate systems or network segments that might be introducing quality degradation due to configuration, bandwidth or latency issues. This eliminates the need for active testing with synthetic traffic after a quality problem is reported, which adds troubleshooting steps and requires end-point deployments throughout the organisation.
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