From time to time, I get in my e-mail inbox some spam from PR agencies who don’t do research on publications before pitching them.
Yes, I know that we’re really good about reporting on a fair number of issues related to network performance, and that we’re well read in our space, and that everyone likes me and wants to be my friend, but NetworkPerformanceDaily is the company blog of NetQoS (at least until a couple of weeks from now, at which time it is likely to become the company blog of the NetQoS division of CA.)
Recently, I received an e-mail pitch from a PR agent employed by another vendor, which talked about how they were adding IP SLA data to their monitoring software as an extra-cost add-on module, and how it “will be providing a virtual crystal ball into the remote WAN-base.”
From their press release: “Until now, deploying the technology has been difficult; due in part to the dependency on command line interface (CLI) prompts to both configure and read results, but also due to the complexity in interpreting the results across multiple devices and network protocols.”
This may be new for the company in question and their customers, but NetQoS (and a few others) have had IP SLA features in our products for years now. They’re acting like they invented stuff that we’ve supported with configuration wizards and superstar reporting since 2005 in NetVoyant,
So we agree that IP SLA is very powerful and a great technique to add to your arsenal for network performance management, but we also caution against equating it to unified communications management. In fact, while we find that NetVoyant is great for configuring and reporting Cisco IP SLA data for jitter, loss and latency statistics, and great for testing across an MPLS cloud, we found it wasn’t all the data that a network engineer would need in order to ensure good VoIP and video quality of experience, so that’s why we also develop a Unified Communications Monitor, which includes metrics such as Mean Opinion Score (MOS), call setup failures, and delay to dial tone.
Plus, Unified Communications monitors real VoIP traffic, giving you data about the actual end-user’s experience. You can also monitor other factors in the network such as the effectiveness of echo cancellation in the voice gateway. You can also report on actual usage and actual usage quality over time – that is, how often you meet call quality commitments – as well as voice interface utilization, top volume by location/user, busy hour call attempts, busy hour call completions, etc.
And don’t forget about measuring how non-UC applications are affected by measuring the response time for all applications. You might also want to know about the composition and usage of these applications on each link too. All of these capabilities and analytics are critical to understanding the complete picture of how the network is supporting application delivery and performance, and that’s why they are all part of the NetQoS Performance Center.
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Kim Shorb, product manager at NetQoS, contributed to this post.
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