Ensuring IP Telephony Performance Through Remote Monitoring

VoIP users expect nothing less than voice services that are “toll-quality” and “always-on” – in other words, just like what they had before their voice and data networks converged. They don’t care that converged network traffic opens the door to jitter, delay, packet loss, echo or a host of other Quality of Service and voice quality issues; they just want to be able to make and receive calls without worries. To meet these unflinching user expectations, it becomes incumbent upon organizations to ensure VoIP call quality and availability before users can be affected by these call performance and quality issues. An IP Telephony monitoring system detects both types of issues before they have a chance to affect users throughout a network.

The availability of IP Telephony services depends on the availability of its supporting network infrastructure. This includes the diverse hardware platforms and operating systems (OS), databases, e-mail platforms and IP Telephonyspecific applications like Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) or Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems. If any of these components malfunction in any way, they will undoubtedly exacerbate the operating conditions and performance of critical IP telephony services such as IP phone availability, TFTP response time, registered devices, call activity, call failures, music on hold and gateway/gatekeeper response time and utilization.