www.voipplanet.com The IT Manager's Guide to Voice over IP Softphones Reviewed Asterisk Tutorial Fundamentals of VoIP Home | Featured Series | News Solutions | Reviews | Trends | Backgrounders | Glossary | Telephony Daily Newsletter Search VoIP Planet internet.commerce Partners & Affiliates internet.com IT Developer Internet News Small Business Personal Technology Search internet.com Advertise Corporate Info Newsletters Tech Jobs E-mail Offers Related Articles • Healthy VoIP Nets—Part XIV—Network Management Architectures: Network Instruments • Healthy VoIP Nets—Part XVI—Network Management Architectures: Ixia • Healthy VoIP Nets—Part XVII—Network Management Architectures: Tektronix Healthy VoIP Nets—Part XVIII—Network Management Architectures: Netscout Systems March 25, 2008 By Mark A. Miller product offering, VoIP Intelligence, allows network managers to achieve higher telephony and video service quality by analyzing VoIP-packet–based call control and multimedia transmissions. I can monitor and analyze the inherent characteristics of IP networks, including latency, jitter, and packet loss. This offering is coupled with the Sniffer Infinistream, which provides continuous long-term capture, giving users access to the data for an entire transaction or series of transactions. Once the data is captured, users can drill down to the area of interest and conduct post-capture analysis using the Sniffer protocol decodes. The Infinistream is available with up to 15 terabytes of network storage, and can support LAN connections up to 10Gb Ethernet, plus WAN connections up to OC-3 ATM rates. Figure 3 - Netscout Intelligence Console VoIP Intelligence is able to rapidly identify individual VoIP calls, video conferences, and overall service usage, and then display key performance information, including call volumes and impairments. The system also includes an integrated replay and time series chart, enabling the network management to both "hear and see" VoIP impairments. It can identify the behavior of other applications and the overall network at the same time. The VoIP Intelligence system also deploys extensive graphics display capabilities, and can provide a single view to monitor VoIP systems and their interaction with other services on the network (see Figure 1); monitor device performance metrics with drill-down analysis on performance threshold violations (see Figure 2); analyze VoIP-based call control and multimedia transmissions (see Figure 3); and integrate a time series chart with the call details, thus providing a further view into voice and video impairments (see Figure 4). Figure 4 - Netscout Completed Calls log Since InfiniStream stores all the packets, it is easy to go back in time to see exactly what took place during a VoIP conversation. Each call is individually tracked with associated metrics. This sets the net manager observe details such as call duration, calling and called parties, packet and byte counts, associated jitter, and which codecs were used for that conversation. Calls can even be replayed to actually "hear" the quality of the conversation. However, since VoIP conversations typically run over a converged network with other media such as data or video simultaneously in use, the solution lets the user see all other applications that may affect call quality. It can be used in reverse as well, to determine when high VoIP call volumes negatively affect other, business-critical applications. Further details on the Netscout architecture and products can be found at http://netscout.com/. Our next tutorial will continue our examination of vendors' network management architectures. Copyright Acknowledgement: © 2008 DigiNet Corporation ®, All Rights Reserved Author's Biography Mark A. Miller, P.E., is President of DigiNet Corporation®, a Denver-based consulting engineering firm. He is the author of many books on networking technologies, including Voice over IP Technologies, and Internet Technologies Handbook, both published by John Wiley & Sons Go to page: Prev  1  2   Tools: Add voipplanet.com to your favorites Add voipplanet.com to your browser search box IE 7 | Firefox 2.0 | Firefox 1.5.x Backgrounders Archives