Ensuring VoIP QoS With Proactive, End-to-End Network Performance and Service Level Monitoring
Overview
When it comes to voice over IP (VoIP) and unified communications, service providers and enterprise IT departments need to deliver the same quality of service (QoS) that their customers expect from basic telephony services. If they can’t, they risk frustrating end users—and in the case of the service providers, losing subscribers and high-value enterprise accounts.
The big challenge with VoIP is that it is extremely bandwidth- and delay-sensitive. Voice packets cannot be dropped, excessively delayed or inconsistent in their transmission speeds (jitter) or the VoIP transmissions will be unintelligible to the recipient.
To guarantee end-user quality of experience, organizations must be able to:
- Monitor and report on end-to-end traffic and service performance across the all-IP infrastructure, including the gateways that connect VoIP and unified communication networks to legacy networks such as PSTN
- Establish and enforce QoS policy on specific data types, typically high priority, mission-critical data and VoIP, to ensure sufficient bandwidth and response times for those applications
- Understand real-time utilization and future capacity impacts based on usage trends to keep network resources and the overall service delivery infrastructure at peak operating condition
- Monitor key voice quality performance indicators such as mean opinion score (MOS), jitter, delay and packet loss, plus get real-time visibility into call data records (CDRs) and IP data records (IPDRs), to understand and better manage the end-user experience
InfoVista provides network, service and application performance management solutions that empower service providers and enterprises to ensure voice quality of service (QoS) by determining and supporting the right level of dedicated bandwidth, understanding and improving packet loss characteristics, avoiding network congestion, and setting business-relevant traffic priorities across the network.
Key Features
InfoVista’s solutions for voice quality of service, including 5View™ Service Data Manager with its Voice Data Manager option and the Unified Communications Knowledge Pack, as well as VistaInsight® for Networks, Broadband Knowledge Pack and the 5View™ VoIP appliance provide:
- Real-time network performance monitoring, reporting and analysis of IP network resources, including multivendor, multiprotocol routers, switches and interfaces
- Comprehensive call monitoring and reporting—from call setup through tear down (that is, for the time the utilized circuit is available)
- Visibility into key call quality metrics including mean opinion score (MOS), jitter, delay, and packet loss
- Fast insight and reporting into the factors contributing to jitter, latency and packet loss, such as link failures, route flapping, router and gateway unavailability, call control signaling failure, and device misconfiguration
- Visibility into VoIP traffic through RTP distribution and call duration reporting
- Real-time alerts that help the operations team to identify performance degradation and provide preemptive care of user services, minimizing potential SLA violations and improving end-user perception
- Support for key VoIP protocols including SIP, H.323, and MGCP
