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WhatsUp Gold VoIP Monitor

Product Overview

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A Brief History of Telephony, Part 1

Developed by Alexander Graham Bell Changed voice into electrical impulses

Bell Network – provided all telephone service in the U.S. Remember operators plugging cables to connect calls?

Automated switches – Public Switched Telephone Network Provided mechanical end-to-end connections - eliminated

operators The next generation – Digital Network

All digital signaling and connections

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Voice over Internet Protocol, Part 2

VoIP is a set of standards to run voice calls over IP networks The various standards that make up VoIP are:

• Session Initiation Protocol or SIP– Provides signaling to setup a "session" or call between two end points (IP Phones

for example)• Real-time Transport Protocol or RTP

– Provides end-to-end transport of VoIP packets across a network• RTCP or Real-time Transport Control Protocol

– Provides monitoring of packets and control to ensure delivery between the two end points

• H.323 – equivalent to SIP

All VoIP protocols use User Datagram Protocol (UDP) as the underlying transport

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VoIP In the Network

VoIP Server

VoIP EnabledRouter

Firewall

H.323 or SIPSignaling

IP Wide Area Network

IP Phones initiate calls Using SIP or H.323 signaling ensures call can be setup –

valid destination and connection available Call is then connected All this happens in real-time

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Benefits of VoIP Integrates voice and data on the same network

Runs on existing data networks both LAN and WAN Eliminates the need for separate voice and data infrastructures

Reduces cost of ownership, management and maintenance

Integrates voice and data on the same network Impact to both application performance and voice traffic

Requires tighter management of network More network equipment to understand and monitor

Downsides of VoIP

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Understanding What You Have to Manage

You can’t manage what you don’t measure and you can’t measure what you don’t collect.

VoIP requires close attention and management!

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How Do You Effectively Manage VoIP?

Need to understand the infrastructure Need to understand utilization on both LAN and WAN Tools to collect, measure and display

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What is IP SLA?

Cisco IOS IP SLA IP SLA is an acronym for IP Service Level Agreements.

• IP SLA was formerly called Service Assurance Agent (SAA).

IP SLA is an embedded, synthetic performance-monitoring tool to measure service performance from the network perspective.

Because IP SLA is embedded in Cisco IOS Software, it is platform-independent for all Cisco routers and switches running Cisco IOS Software.

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Why Use IP SLA?

For testing the availability & performance of Cisco based networks and the services running upon them. Any organization that deploys Cisco equipment in their network,

especially for VoIP, can use IP SLA to proactively monitor the most critical links of their network to ensure that they are performing as desired.

Until the availability of IP SLA, organizations have relied on ICMP (ping) servers and/or hardware based probes Both of these methods have serious drawbacks

• IMCP servers simply cannot provide the necessary data; a big technical limitation

• Hardware based probes are expensive to purchase, difficult to deploy and are often impractical

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Terminology Latency

Latency is the delay of time it takes for a packet to be sent from one device to another device in a network. There are two types of latency measurement; one-way (the time from the source sending a packet to the destination receiving it), or round-trip (the one-way latency from source to destination plus the one-way latency from the destination back to the source). Round-trip latency is more often quoted, because it can be measured from a single point. An IP service called ping is a relatively accurate way that can be used to measure round-trip latency.

Jitter In networks, jitter is the variation in the time between packets arriving. For

example, the delay in arrival time of packets can be caused by network congestion, or changes to the route of packets due to failure of equipment. Jitter can impact IP protocols that are time sensitive such as VoIP.

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Terminology cont’d Packet Loss

Packet loss occurs when one or more packets of data traveling across a computer network fail to reach their destination. The two main protocols of IP based networks, TCP and UDP can both encounter packet loss. UDP is more susceptible to the effects of packet loss because it is connectionless and does not acknowledge packet receipt. An example of an IP Service running on UDP is VoIP.

Mean Opinion Score (MOS) The quality of transmitted speech is a subjective judgment of the listener. A

common benchmark used to determine the quality of sound produced by specific telephone calls is the mean opinion score (MOS). With MOS, a wide range of listeners judge the quality of a voice sample on a scale of 1 (bad) to 5 (excellent). The scores are averaged to provide the MOS for that sample. Rather than using the subjective human approach, automated tools to generate MOS calculations are now in use.

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Terminology cont’d

Calculated Planning Impairment Factor (ICPIF) ICPIF represents the combination of loss and delay in a VoIP network call at

predefined values. Packet loss and delay (latency) determine the threshold for calculating the impairment factor and determining if a VoIP call can be made.

Codec Codecs or coding and decoding can be either hardware based processors

or software programs. Codecs code analog voice into a digital or packetized data stream and decode it back into analog voice.

Quality of Service All measurements together provide Quality of Service (QoS) levels for the

network

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Introducing WhatsUp Gold VoIP Monitor

What does it do? Measures capability to support VoIP in live and active networks On both Local Area and Wide Area networks

• Specifically latency, jitter and packet loss

How does it do it? Uses both SNMP performance and active monitors

• Collects data generated by Cisco routers or switches through RTTMON MIB

Routers or switches must have IP SLA enabled on them

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Key Features

8 Performance Monitors 6 monitors display latency, jitter and packet loss

• From source to destination and from destination to source 2 monitors display MOS and ICPIF in gauge views

1 Active Monitor Alerts when MOS value falls below preset threshold

Configuration Wizard The wizard scans the WhatsUp Gold database for SNMP devices with

credentials The wizard then steps through the set up for VoIP performance monitors,

workspace views, and active monitors for the selected IP SLA devices Reporting

Generates workspace views on collected data

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WhatsUp Gold VoIP Monitor

IP Network

IP SLADestination

IP SLADestination

IP SLASource

WhatsUp GoldManagement Solution

w/VoIP plug-in

After the required devices are identified, an IP SLA source device can be selected as the source for VoIP Round-Trip Time (RTT) data.

Packets are then sent between source and destination or destination and source and then collected by WhatsUp Gold

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VoIP Workspace View

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Key Benefits Plug-in to WhatsUp Gold core architectural framework VoIP Monitor is supported in all editions of WhatsUp Gold No limit on the number of IP SLA sources or destinations Fully integrated with management and reporting infrastructure Provides accurate measurement of network ability to support

VoIP Leverages deployed Cisco technology

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Qualifying Questions to Ask

Are you assessing VoIP or have it deployed? Have you base-lined your network to understand it’s

performance? Do you have VoIP performance issues? Do you have any capability to measure your network

performance to ensure VoIP call quality? Do you have Cisco equipment in your network?

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Thank you