Making the Connection between Unified Communications and VoIP Quality of Experience and Network Quality of Service

More than any other application suite, unified communications requires an optimal quality of experience. The combination of NetQoS Unified Communications Monitor and the NetQoS Performance Center helps you ensure both quality of experience and network quality of service.

The introduction of unified communications and VoIP present specific challenges that can only be addressed with network-centric performance management products. Existing management products lack the metrics specific to managing unified communications services or only monitor a specific component of unified communications, such as VoIP.

NetQoS Unified Communications Monitor is a network-based voice and video monitoring product that tracks the quality of end user experience, provides alerts on performance problems, and isolates performance issues to speed troubleshooting and MTTR. NetQoS Unified Communications Monitor is integrated with the NetQoS Performance Center so you can monitor unified communications quality of experience while managing network quality of service, from a single, Web-based console.

With Unified Communications Monitor you can assess the performance of your Cisco Unified Communications Manager or Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) platforms by tracking, evaluating, and reporting on key metrics without deploying server agents or client-side probes. Within a single report, NetQoS Unified Communications Monitor displays call and video quality measurements against a baseline threshold for any network segment.

How Does NetQoS Unified Communications Monitor Help You?

1. Gain insight into metrics to ensure unified communications quality of experience.


• Report on metrics associated with delivering unified communications such as jitter, latency, packet loss, and frame loss
• Provide both call quality and call setup metrics, such as Mean Opinion Score (MOS), jitter, buffer loss, call setup failures, and delay to dial tone
• Provide video quality metrics such as frozen video minutes, frame loss, and latency


2. Solve unified communications problems faster by isolating the source to specific locations, transmission types, or equipment.


• Customize alerts and thresholds according to your needs to help you pinpoint specific unified communications performance issues on your network
• Assign performance thresholds to specific pairs of network locations, pairs of gateways, or pairs of locations and gateways. Reports show you which pair is experiencing the most severe problem, giving you the insight to determine which network paths are candidates for further diagnosis
• Drill down to individual network locations or gateways to quickly identify unified communications performance problems on your network
• Configure thresholds and alerts to speed troubleshooting time for problems affecting only a single voice or video transmission
• Specify the minimum number of calls and maximum percentage of call failures that trigger an incident
• Set a minimum number of call minutes and threshold values for MOS and jitter
• Set a minimum duration after which automated incident responses are initiated in the form of traps, e-mail notifications, or further investigations


3. Measure how your network is supporting unified communications quality.


• Quickly identify how well voice and video are performing for your users via unified communications quality information for the global enterprise and for each location
• Avoid costly fire drills frequently needed to prove that the network is delivering the required quality of service
• Leverage NetQoS Unified Communications Monitor active monitoring functions such as a Call Watch for any phone with known or suspected quality problems. Retrieve second-by-second, detailed insight into call progress and quality via Call Watch, as soon as any call is made to or from its phone number


4. Evaluate call activity and plan for updates.


• View capacity across the entire enterprise or for a specific location or gateway via Capacity planning reports to determine busy-hour call attempts and busy-hour call completions on the network
• Provide a view of the effects of call volume on call performance and help track trends in call setup failure rates
• More effectively negotiate contracts with service providers using utilization reports, which include per interface statistics and identify individual channels

Request a NetQoS UCM demo