by Ray Horak, Technology Editor, Telecom Reseller
In the beginning, VoIP was all about cheap long distance phone calls over the Internet. The quality of service (QoS) was awful, but the price was right. In those early days, VoIP appealed mostly to college students, hobbyists, geeks and bargain hunters. Over time, QoS mechanisms matured, carriers committed, PBX manufacturers ponied up and VoIP worked its way into the workplace in a big way. Contemporary business class VoIP isn’t about cheap long distance but rather about applications integration and Unified Communications (UC). QoS issues linger, however.
PathSolutions was founded in February 1998 by Tim Titus, who currently serves as the CTO. I recently had a chance to visit with Titus, who explained that he formed the company after 21 years as a network engineer, manager and director. “I loved the work, but my efforts and those of my colleagues were continually frustrated by the lack of solid network management tools. It was bad enough when was voice was TDM, but when VoIP got legs and truly converged with data communications, the complexities increased by at least an order of magnitude. Installation and configuration of a typical network management solution took weeks or months, during which time the network manager was flying blind. I knew it didn’t have to be that hard, so we set out to develop a solution that is simple and quick to install and configure and that yields virtually immediate results in understandable form. We released PathSolution Network Monitor and VoIP Monitor 5 years ago. They now are in version 4.0.”
Titus explained that VoIP QoS suffers when the network is unable to provide stable packet flow. Although the WAN certainly can be the source of the problem, it all too often is a lot closer to home, i.e., on the LAN. Performance issues can develop anywhere and often are transient, which makes them exceedingly difficult to identify, isolate, analyze and resolve. The typical troubleshooting approach involves installing VoIP agents on PCs behind IP phones to measure end-to-end call quality as described by latency, jitter and loss. The network engineer then performs the task of determining specific links and interfaces involved, logging into switches and routers to query error counters and examine interface configurations. Remote agents must be removed and reinstalled. Packet analyzers (i.e., sniffers) generate alerts, but do not identify the source of the loss. As each analyzer sits at a specific point in the network, multiple analyzers must be deployed to pinpoint a problem. Call simulators often can’t replicate the problem, as it may not be purely load related.
Titus explained that “PathSolutions VoIP Monitor is a 6 MB download that will monitor networks as large as 30,000 nodes from a single deployment. It takes about 15 minutes to install and configure, then you just let it run for 24 hours. VoIP Monitor uses SNMP to interrogate network elements, gathering health and status data on every switch, router, gateway and link. It identifies, isolated and diagnoses Layer 2 [Link Layer] and Layer 3 [Network Layer] problems automatically. The network prescription engine provides plain-English error descriptions and resolutions, so you can then just walk the network and fix the cabling faults, duplex mismatches and so on. Once installed, VoIP Monitor continuously monitors the health and performance of every device and link in a network, quickly diagnosing and isolating performance issues, guiding their resolution and, thereby, increasing the efficient and productive use of network resources.”
As PathSolutions VoIP Monitor and Network Monitor (for non-VoIP LAN applications) were designed for the management of complex multivendor networks, they are completely vendor agnostic. PathSolutions are available both on a licensed basis and as a service. More at pathsolutions.com.
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