Tag Archives: VoIP

The Importance of Communications and Operational Continuity

Posted on November 1, 2012 by
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As the effects of Superstorm Sandy are still being felt all over the East Coast, I can’t help but reflect on the importance of Communications especially during times of disaster. Business Continuity requires visibility, availability, reliability and redundancy to ensure the entire organization is kept well informed during emergencies.  Are remote locations healthy and available or are services potentially degrading to prevent remote employees from being productive? When the business must reprioritize functions between different geographic territories, are the communications networks successful in handling the increased workload for service quality and throughput?

In many organizations, the burden of responsibility to ensure such continuity relies on network operations to fulfill such functions either manually, through tools or a hybrid approach.  Operational visibility must go beyond standard network measures and must include metrics for environmental monitoring and service quality. The fluidity of emergency conditions means businesses must dynamically adjust functions across geographic regions.

Real-Time visibility into all aspects of the network is a necessity when performing such dynamic business changes:

  • Are sites experiencing any extreme environmental conditions such as power loss, UPS backup battery activation, increased humidity levels, spikes in electrical circuits?  While the site may be available, such conditions are the proactive measures to identify potential network failures.
  • When the business must re-distribute functions between different geographic regions, are the failover/redundant locations ready for the increased workload?  Real-time visibility into throughput, bandwidth, errors and load provide the necessary insight to determine any critical load factors.
  • During regional communication outages, are your dial-plan, routing and priorities defined accurately to re-distribute the workload? Real-time visibility into call failures and RTP call path variations are required to determine if Unified Communications are prepared for regional outages.
  • When communications have been re-routed to different geographic regions, how has/will service quality degrade, are new routing paths experiencing higher latency, are mis-configured packet priorities degrading voice quality? Real-time visibility into call paths, VoIP QoS and overall RTP QoS are a must during such dynamic changes for an acceptable end-user Quality of Experience.
  • Finally, does operations have the necessary unified view of the network across the regional centers, are there multiple tools to identify degradations or is it a single MOM, do redundant operational teams share similar data? Fluidity of emergency conditions means network operations must equally re-distribute functions to ensure business continuity and having a single MOM aids in the process. A unified view shared amongst redundant operational centers ensures no gaps exist in monitoring the network, i.e, did we not have visibility over the environmental conditions because Application X monitors environmental while Application Y monitors communications?

A well designed strategy for operations ensures continued business functions during unforeseen events such as Superstorm Sandy, however a strategy that utilizes the correct combination of technology and resources ensures a successful execution of the strategy. As the Northeast regions of the US must revise their emergency preparedness in-light of the impact of Superstorm Sandy, so-to must Enterprises review the impact of network outages and business continuity to ensure a more cost-effective and efficient strategy that minimizes down-time.

Categories: Convergence Technologies | Tags: , , ,

The Need for ReliaTel 4.0 Dashboards

Posted on April 23, 2012 by
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We recently announced the release of ReliaTel 4.0 and officially launched at the Enterprise Connect show in Orlando. Amongst the key features packed into this major release, we introduced a new Dashboard interface that benefits both management and operations.

So why build a new dashboard interface other than improving the visual appeal of data (which is does quite well actually)? Simply, the world of Unified Communications introduces collaboration technologies traversing the traditional data infrastructure. A view of UC service issues that ignores the physical server or networking components provides only a portion of the data required to troubleshoot or resolve the problem.

Let’s take a typical example of an Avaya Aura Communication architecture that includes an Avaya S8800 Media Server platform hosting several communications applications including the core call control, call admission, signaling services, attendant features, etc… Properly managing an Avaya S8800 device includes requiring visibility over the:

  • Physical hardware platform
  • Available OS system resources
  • Network connections
  • Aura application specific alerts
  • Boards availability
  • Availability over the SIP, H.323, ISDN, etc…trunks and channels
  • Availability of the gateways providing branch location services
  • All gateway specific application alerts
  • DSP resources
  • Traffic usage
  • Traffic capacity planning
  • Real-Time VoIP Quality of Service metrics
  • Call Detail Records
  • Attendant statistics
  • And much more….

ReliaTel can already consolidate the visibility of all the complex data required to manage such an Avaya Aura environment with ease and minimal administration. The addition of ReliaTel dashboards, however, enhances this view to consolidate the information further so that engineers can have simultaneous visibility over the platform alerts, platform resources, traffic capacity alerts, VoIP QoS issues, network statistics on the platform, etc…so that any relationship between seemingly disparate data can be viewed within a single-pane-of-glass.

A unified dashboard view that provides real-time visibility of application specific data creates a dynamic method to not just troubleshoot problems but to reduce your overall mean time to troubleshoot / mean time to repair and free up your valuable resources to increase productivity. The value of unifying data to a singular dashboard is realized by:

  • Tier1 operations personnel utilizing less screens to access the required data
  • Utilizing a standard method to ensure Tier2 and Tier3 engineers access the same data sources to reduce troubleshooting time
  • Creating a more visual and hence easier to track trending view of the managed environment to better identify any correlations of data.

As we continue to see the adoption of managing the monitored environment made easier through the use of dashboards, we should continue to see the business benefits to both management and operations.

Categories: Convergence Technologies | Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Tone Launches New ReliaTel 4.0

Posted on March 23, 2012 by
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This week, Tone Software announced the release of the highly anticipated ReliaTel 4.0 release that includes product features designed to positively impact the Operational and Business returns for the Enterprise, MSP and Integrator markets. Over the next few weeks, I will highlight the key features as individual blog entries to provide a more in-depth analysis of the release. Furthermore, stay tuned to our blog as we officially launch the ReliaTel 4.0 release at The Enterprise Connect  show in Orlando next week.

The culmination of customer and industry feedback helped shape the myriad of features that are included within the ReliaTel 4.0 release. Among the key features of the new release are:

  • Updated Fault Management Alarms List – Designed for a more optimized workflow
  • Fault Management Alarms Blacklisting – Reduce the extraneous time wasted in addressing frequently occurring false alerts
  • Enhanced Access Plus – Expands remote access capabilities for devices to include GUI based connections in addition to console based connections
  • Prioritized Traceroute – A new troubleshooting tool to either schedule or launch on-demand traceroutes to both internal and external destinations with the ability to tag packets
  • Dashboards - New management and device level dashboarding interface for both real-time and aggregate historical views of the managed network. ReliaTel dashboards will provide off-the-shelf capabilities unique to specific devices and hence provide device specific metrics
  • Agentless Windows Monitoring – Expands ReliaTel’s Windows monitoring capabilities to include remote monitoring via WMI

Adding the new 4.0 capabilities to the existing comprehensive Infrastructure and VoIP QoS monitoring solution transforms ReliaTel into one of the most Operationally advanced solution in the industry. The added benefits of 4.0 transforms the value proposition of ReliaTel for the target markets of:

MSP / Integrator

  • Reduce Tier1 operational time in managing client networks through Alarms Blacklisting
  • Standardize on remote access capabilities to the client devices through Access Plus
  • Reduce the number of screens required to troubleshoot client issues through both Access Plus and Prioritized Traceroute
  • Provide seamless web based portal views to your clients on the overall status of the managed network through the multi-tenant dashboards
  • Analyze real-time device specific metrics through dashboards to determine overall device and application behavior or interdependencies

Enterprise

  • The need to streamline Tier1 resources has relevance to any Operational team which includes the Enterprise operations through the use of Alarms Blacklisting
  • Raise your awareness of branch locations connectivity via SIP trunks through scheduled Prioritized Traceroutes baselining performance.
  • Provide management with a single dashboard of the overall operations group performance
  • Analyze real-time device specific metrics through dashboards to determine overall device and application behavior or interdependencies

As the highly anticipated ReliaTel 4.0 is deployed to existing and new locations we look forward to the realized technical and operational benefit that will be achieved. Look towards the coming weeks for a more in-depth detail of each major feature included within ReliaTel 4.0.

Categories: Convergence Technologies | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Why is MOS so easily dismissed?

Posted on September 16, 2011 by
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If the mere mention of MOS (Mean Opinion Score) conjures up some high level sales terminology that’s meant to gloss over the details and provides little impact to troubleshooting VoIP QoS, then don’t worry because you are not alone.  Over the past few years, I’ve noticed a growing trend amongst our technology peers who have similar feelings when discussing MOS as a factor of visibility to VoIP networks. Most anecdotal responses to my queries of dismissal end in “…I can’t fix my network using MOS.” So I ponder the dismissal; Has the audience expertise surpassed the oversimplified value of MOS? Has MOS outgrown it’s value in how we operate our VoIP networks? or is there something more subtle creating the perception of dismissal?

Background:
MOS originated from a need to demystify the complex impairments that affect conversations and provide a user perception for voice quality. Measuring analog voice conversations include impairments such as noise, echo, distortion, signal-to-noise ratio, etc… Simplifying the voice quality to a scale between 1 and 5 allowed providers and consumers to identify if an impairment exceeded thresholds that could manifest in an acoustic perceivable impairment.

As network migration towards Voice over IP was introduced, MOS played/plays another critical role in determining if the VoIP Quality of Service is similar or better than the analog voice quality. Certainly VoIP QoS measurements account for packetized impairments such as packet loss, jitter and delays, however the acoustic perception of a MOS=3.5 (for example) voice quality should be similar between analog and VoIP.

Today, we see the proliferation of VoIP increase to a dominant role within the enterprise network and comparison to analog circuits is no longer a primary requirement. Instead, we now prefer access to all the raw impairments when managing the VoIP network and too-often focus on the peaks/valleys of impairments as the key driver in managing VoIP QoS.

As a fellow technology enthusiast, I understand the need to analyze and operate the VoIP network using the variances in the individual impairments, however I also see merit in utilizing MOS scores.

  • When attempting to quantify the overall status of user experiences within the VoIP network, utilizing MOS provides a quick management performance indicator.
  • When determining the expected VoIP QoS between codec variances, MOS once again creates the necessary differentiation to determine the acceptable impairments for each codec utilized.
  • Lastly, MOS helps to establish a baseline of acceptable VoIP QoS within the network and aids to discover any variances when network conditions change such as load or device firmware.

Summary: MOS still has a place within our operational processes of the VoIP network, however we must adapt our usage when maintaining VoIP services. Since we have become more educated in real-world VoIP experiences, the need to simplify the impairments and identify if the PSTN is better/worse than VoIP is not greatly utilized. However, there are times where even I look at call with packet loss >1.3% on a G.711 codec and wonder if the conversation quality was actually impacted. MOS has not outgrown it’s value as a key performance indicator, instead the usage of MOS needs to change to a more macroscopic indicator of the VoIP network instead of the metric we use day-to-day to troubleshoot call quality.

Categories: Convergence Technologies | Tags: , , , , , , ,