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.