VoIP Monitoring on
Converged Voice/Data Networks with WhatsUp Gold VoIP Monitor
Managing VoIP on Your IT
Network Infrastructure
Introducing the WhatsUp
Gold VoIP Monitor plug-in for WhatsUp Gold v12 (and above). As the first
in a series of plug-ins to the extensible WhatsUp Gold product-family
architecture, the WhatsUp Gold VoIP Monitor is designed to extend the
power of WhatsUp Gold with the capability to monitor and report on your
network's capacity to support and maintain acceptable call quality for
Voice over IP (VoIP).
The WhatsUp Gold VoIP
Monitor accesses information generated by Cisco IP SLA (service level
agreement) enabled devices to monitor parameters essential to VoIP
performance, including jitter, packet loss, latency and other calculated
performance values. The VoIP Monitor leverages the core services of
WhatsUp Gold v12 and seamlessly integrates with its versatile network
management capabilities, giving customers with combined data and voice
networks 360 degree visibility, actionable intelligence and complete
control for VoIP.
Addressing Convergence
Challenges
Voice/data convergence poses new challenges for
network managers. Introducing voice traffic onto your data network can
result in degraded overall performance for both traffic types. Avoiding
such problems requires that you ensure adequate service levels for all
traffic even under varying load conditions on your LAN and across the WAN.
To validate and ensure acceptable response times for both voice and data
you must be able to accurately measure network performance in real-world
scenarios.
The WhatsUp Gold VoIP
Monitor precisely measures your converged IT network's ability to provide
the quality of service (QoS) necessary for your VoIP calls on your LAN and
WAN links. It is designed as a plug-in for all editions of WhatsUp Gold
(Standard, Premium, Distributed and MSP) and works with WhatsUp Gold
version 12.0 and higher. A configuration wizard minimizes the time
required to identify IP SLA sources and destinations and to configure the
VoIP Monitor. After the simple setup, the VoIP Monitor provides everything
you need to assess the readiness or current ability of your network to
support VoIP based traffic. Moreover, because it is fully integrated with
the WhatsUp Gold network management platform, you can drill down into the
underlying WhatsUp Gold functionality to view and graph metrics for
bandwidth and interface utilization or troubleshoot network issues
affecting VoIP performance.
Key features of WhatsUp VoIP
Monitor include:
- Performance Monitors for Network
Measurement
Eight new performance monitors, including six
that measure jitter, latency, and packet loss from both source to
destination and from destination to source, and two that provide values
for ICPIF (calculated planning impairment factor) and MOS (mean opinion
score). The performance monitors leverage IP SLA synthetic calls sent
between VoIP devices, avoiding additional load on the network.
- Active Monitor for Mean Opinion Score
(MOS)
A configurable active monitor for MOS that can trigger
an alert if network degradation causes the MOS value to drop below a
user configured threshold.
- WhatsUp VoIP Monitor Configuration Wizard
A configuration utility that scans the WhatsUp Gold
database for IP SLA enabled devices and lets you select an IP SLA source
device for gathering VoIP RTT (round-trip time) data. The wizard then
steps through the set up for VoIP performance monitors, workspace views,
and active monitors for the selected IP SLA enabled devices.
- VoIP Monitor Workspace View
A unified
view of VoIP performance metrics that is fully integrated with the
management and reporting infrastructure of WhatsUp Gold. VoIP data is
clearly presented in a single workspace view, and you can drill down
into the underlying WhatsUp Gold functionality to troubleshoot network
issues that could affect VoIP performance.
|
| 
|
