Having a strategic plan in place for VoIP performance management with visibility from edge-to-core throughout the VoIP lifecycle is imperative to having a successful VoIP deployment experience. A comprehensive, enterprise approach of best practices enables network managers to manage the entire VoIP lifecycle - from pre-deployment assessment, ongoing monitoring and management, optimizing and planning for future growth.
Our solutions enable an enterprise to successfully deploy and manage VoIP to leverage its benefits without negatively impacting data performance within a converged network. As the only vendor to provide edge-to-core visibility through all aspects of the VoIP lifecycle, we support the management of VoIP, data applications and the general network infrastructure. This is critical to enterprise performance management as voice and data converge, since each has the potential to impact the other. Having a network, application, and VoIP specific analytics allows you to clearly see how data traffic is affecting call quality, and how VoIP traffic is affecting data quality, a significant advantage over products that look only at voice. Fluke Networks' VoIP Performance Management approach is unparalleled with the breadth of visibility and depth of analysis our solutions provide including executive level reporting to drill down analysis troubleshooting.
On an enterprise level, best practices allow you to measure infrastructure effectiveness in the converged voice and data environment, build out and transition new networks, and quickly zero in on application performance issues. We call our family of best practices for VoIP Performance, AMMO - Assess, Monitor, Manage and Optimize - a disciplined approach to leveraging the benefits of high-performance VoIP in a converged network and maximizing the value of infrastructure.
Assess
Is your infrastructure prepared to deploy and support VoIP? In order to have a successful VoIP rollout, your voice traffic must co-exist with your business critical data traffic. Without a complete assessment of your network infrastructure from LAN and WAN to desktops and phones, you run the risk of major performance issues - both with existing applications and with your VoIP rollout.
- Assess network readiness: Baseline and monitor actual usage and performance prior to deploying VoIP and determine if the network should be modified to handle voice calls. Then verify any performance changes one VoIP is deployed for a continuous assessment.
- Observe conversations between phone and network: Verify that all elements are communicating properly. Determine whether the call set-up time is acceptable. Verify voice quality, checking for jitter, latency, and dropped packets on individual phones and conversations.
- Verify deployment: Show that each drop is active (wall jack, cable and switch ports are functional); each phone can receive power from the switch; each phone can communicate properly with network servers; and each switch port is configured properly. Generate and measure synthetic VoIP traffic to predictively assess call quality prior to full deployment.
- Establish a performance baseline: Set goals for system availability and call quality. Again, synthetic traffic can be utilized to predict post-deployment quality. Compare measured quality of service (QoS) scores with goals. Calculate an aggregate "health score" for all VoIP calls on each link to VLAN. The ability to measure call quality at individual phones will help resolve any specific user complaints. The interaction between newly added voice traffic and existing data flow should be tracked on each link or VLAN.
Monitor
Does your VoIP call quality meet your goals? Do you have network visibility to address VoIP issues before they affect end-users? Once you have deployed VoIP, monitoring detailed actual traffic - both voice and data - is the next step to identifying, isolating and managing performance issues in a proactive manner.
The key to proactive monitoring is to identify potential issues before performance is actually degraded. For example, identifying a huge spike in web traffic that could impact voice quality or a higher than expected number of concurrent calls impacting another business critical application. It is essential to identifying and resolving performance issues before they can impact end-users. Having a standing monitoring solution in place also gives you a complete performance history. This enables you to go back and see what happened at any given time, so you can quickly identify root causes and reduce MTTR. Ongoing monitoring can be conducted at several points on the network, from the core, individual routers, distributed points on the network, and WAN links.
Manage
VoIP problems have a myriad of causes - from physical problems on the local loop to an over-utilized port to mis-configured class of service (CoS) settings or high levels of jitter within the voice application itself. Your management and troubleshooting strategy needs to be broad - giving you visibility from the edge phone to the WAN link, between remote locations, and from the core across the vista of your entire network. This is critical to identifying and isolating the cause of degradation to reduce the MTTR when seconds and minutes saved often go straight to the bottom line.
Intermittent issues can be a greater challenge than real-time issues, because they come and go, often increasing and causing more havoc over time. With VoIP, it is especially important to find and resolve intermittent problems before they grow and impact more users. In order to do so, network managers must be able to troubleshoot issues ranging from the local loop, to the port, to service level parameters across every site.
Optimize
Making the most of VoIP is an ongoing process that requires capacity planning and traffic management, baselining performance, and continuous improvement. Ultimately, it is a matter of visibility and control. For an IT manager with a converged network, the management information ranging from the edge-to-the-core is critical to making control decisions that improve performance. Instead of guessing what might be impacting performance, granular visibility can help make decisions such as:
- Increasing bandwidth to handle additional usage caused by VoIP
- Leveraging and fine-tuning CoS capabilities with an MPLS deployment
- Improving service level parameters from the service provider
- Shaping traffic so the most business-critical and delay-sensitive applications have priority
- Eliminating recreational applications such as file sharing and streaming media
- Building the physical infrastructure to meet the new demands for a converged network