Managing VOIP effectively. Without the right tools, fixing one problem can mean causing another.
<<<... Sobeski, who oversees a voice network that ultimately will support about 1,000 phones, including those at a second location in Chicago, says he uses Qovia IP Telephony Manager in concert with HP OpenView and CiscoWorks to get a complete picture of converged network performance. Qovia uses management software and distributed remote appliances that act as sniffers for voice traffic, reporting back performance metrics and notifying when thresholds are missed.
With virtual LANs in place to segment voice traffic, and QoS priorities set on his Cisco gear, Sobeski says he gets near real-time statistics on call quality and network performance. "We can see a display of the CEO's call quality, if we have too many poor MOS [mean opinion score] readings, if call managers are running too high on memory - basically we get visibility into all pieces of the network in as close to real time as I've seen so far," Sobeski says. Monitoring both voice and data Scott Peterson, director or network services at Accenture in Dallas, tapped his InfoVista management products to track data and voice network performance. He says when the company - which is undergoing a large voice deployment across some 140 internal locations supporting 130,000 employees - chose a management software provider a few years ago, it went with InfoVista, which had proved its software could monitor both types of networks.
The company also uses EMC Smarts for network management and correlation tools and BMC for its client/server management product. "We have had the voice network growing for about five or six years and we picked our management tool two years ago," Peterson says. "We are trying to use the fewest number of management applications to get visibility into our entire network. Subtle changes in IP traffic can be enough to impact voice." more >>>