Cisco Live Day 2 and Performance Visibility for VoIP Deployments

  

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The second day is always quite busy with Cisco announcements and keynotes, and night time parties. The big Cisco announcement was the refresh of the Catalyst 6500 series along with the new Sup2T that enables the 6500 to support up to 100,000 mobile devices. It was great to see my former Veritas colleague Scott Gainey on stage for the announcement and then later at the China Grill celebrating with his team.

At the World of Solutions, we’ve had a lot of interest in our theater presentation on performance visibility for new projects like IP telephony based on Cisco Unified Communications Manager. When you are launching a new service or application onto the network or your data center, ask yourself the following questions:

• Is my network ready for the new application? Can I baseline the network today to see if we can deliver the new service as well?

• After we launch, can I baseline normal performance levels and get alerts when thresholds get violated?

• Can I build an Operations Dashboard to show how things look at a glance?

• Can I monitor how many mobile and remote users are accessing the network and look for usage trends?

• Can I make sure the QoS policies I set are working to protect this critical application on the network?

As I mentioned in our Cisco Live Day 1 blog, it is critical to be able to collect everything to get complete visibility.

During the example of a new IP Telephony rollout, at our booth theater we walk through a specific example of Cisco Dave launching VoIP in his environment. First, he needs to make sure he has the visibility to ensure that when he initiates a call to his VP, the call quality meets or exceeds expectations. Dave set up his SevOne network performance management system to collect KPIs for the network like QoS queue utilization, and also collect key statistics for the Call Manager server. Further, he implemented IP SLA tests to measure end-to-end latency, he also gathers call data via RTCP to understand actual call MOS, Jitter and latency.

With SevOne’s flexible reporting, Dave can easily report on key Call Manager statistics such as CPU performance, memory usage, interface performance, call per second, number of registered phones, Call Manager heartbeat, as well as MOS, Jitter and latency. Being able to see all of this data in one place, normalized and consistent, allows Dave to easily recognize when the Call Manager performance suffers, and what the impact is on call quality and success.

Who benefits from collection and reporting on all of this data? Typically Operations Departments benefit first from early indication of pending problems. They get alerts and they start troubleshooting before their customers feel impact. After triaging a problem, the Ops team shares dashboards and Instant Report data with their internal customers. "Hey boss, here is the problem we just fixed. Hey Remote office, you were about to have a problem as your Internet connection was slowing, but we fixed the problem and you’re welcome."

Please stop by our booth #1833 and see how to get Effective Performance Management via complete and immediate performance visibility. Get our cool new T-shirt before we run out and follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and enter our iPad 2 giveaway!

Mike Miracle is Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for SevOne.