Real-time VoIP diagnostics simplified and improved

Real-time VoIP diagnostics, including call-by-call quality of service

tracking, are now part of Fluke Networks´ OptiView Link Analyser and

Protocol Expert network monitoring and analysis solution, the company has

announced.

Network managers can now see all levels of VoIP activity on their network,

from very broad-based call volume and call quality to individual call

channel details. This allows real-time 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 can´t check to see if their

existing infrastructure will support VoIP, and even fewer have a plan for

managing VoIP once it´s deployed. Without useful monitoring and

troubleshooting solutions like the new versions of OptiView Link Analyser

and OptiView Protocol Expert, call quality may cause nothing but user

complaints and frustration.”

The VoIP analysis features in OptiView Link Analyser provide a real-time

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. The real-time capabilities provide IT professionals with

continuous vision of VoIP call quality in dynamic, changing network

environments.

The VoIP capabilities in Protocol Expert and Link Analyser make it easy to

view VoIP traffic in aggregate, by call or in detail by channel. While

other protocol analysers provide only VoIP decodes, OptiView Protocol Expert

tracks packets on a call-by-call basis while measuring important

characteristics, such as jitter, dropped packets, setup 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), says the

company.

VoIP specific alarms trigger on dropped calls, setup failures, jitter,

dropped packets and QoS metrics, alerting the network manager to VoIP issues

before end users call a help desk. Support for SCCP, SIP, H.323 and MGCP

signaling protocols ensures all call types can be tracked and analyzed. 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 Analyser measures VoIP packets along the network, compared to

some techniques which only report data generated at the end points, usually

a phone or gateway. Using these live VoIP measurements, Link Analyser 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.