Unified Communication Monitoring Options

Joana Till Johnson, leading the Nemertes research team, recently wrote in Network World that “less than 40% of organizations are doing direct, regular assessments of application performance at the desktop.”

This is a problem, she notes, because VoIP and other Unified Communications applications are becoming a core part of the IT environment and crucial to the enterprise – and while most enterprises monitor servers and networks, they often overlook the end-user’s desktop.  The only “monitoring” going on is when users call the help desk, which is a rather inefficient and expensive way to monitor performance.

NetQoS actually makes a unified communications monitor, called “NetQoS Unified Communications Monitor” in order to monitor unified communications… Darn, I think I let that last sentence get away from me there unified communications.

Okay, I’ll stop now.

Of course, for whatever reason you may not like the idea of using an application suite to track quality of experience and network response times.  Luckily, that’s not the only option. There’s also NetQoS Option B.

NetQoS Option B consists of the NetQoS End User Brainwave Frustration Monitor, mounted on each end-user.  When unified communication problems cause sufficient frustration, they send signals to the NetQoS Unified Shock Collar System, worn by all NOC staff.  This sends out an uncomfortable but not harmful reminder to the NOC staff that there’s a problem with communications, and they will hurry to fix the problem. Or they will be eaten by a dinosaur.

See Fig. 1.