NetQoS VoIP Monitor v1.1 Improves VoIP Performance and Planning

Enhanced Troubleshooting and Reporting Plus SIP Support Help IT Professionals Solve VoIP Problems Faster and Plan for Growth

VOICECON, ORLANDO, Florida – March 18, 2008 – As network engineers and IP telephony professionals expand VoIP pilots into organization-wide deployments, performance management becomes more critical. NetQoS® Inc. has launched NetQoS VoIP Monitor v1.1 with additional reporting and troubleshooting capabilities, along with support for SIP, to help monitor and improve VoIP call setup and call quality in existing deployments and plan for expansions.

“NetQoS VoIP Monitor is the only product that unites VoIP quality of service with network performance to provide metrics for end-user call quality of experience and facilitate targeted troubleshooting,” said Steve Harriman, vice president of marketing for NetQoS. “This newest version of VoIP Monitor includes automatic and on-demand investigations to speed problem diagnosis as well as enhanced trend reports to aid planning for future deployments.”

NetQoS VoIP Monitor v1.1 Capabilities:

SIP Support: VoIP Monitor v1.1 adds support for SIP, a key building block for the move to unified communications. By supporting SIP today in a Cisco IP telephony environment, VoIP Monitor lays the groundwork for future SIP-based solutions.

Automatic and On-demand Problem Investigation: VoIP Monitor v1.1 facilitates faster troubleshooting by offering automatic investigations when a VoIP performance threshold, such as delay to dial tone, is exceeded, tracing the call signaling path and comparing it to an automatic baseline. The user can also initiate an investigation on demand at any time.

Capacity Planning Reports: To help both operators and engineers evaluate or plan additions to a current VoIP implementation, VoIP Monitor v1.1 provides enhanced reports for tracking call activity, including information about call volume, call quality, call failures, grade of service, and gateway utilization. These new reports enable IT professionals to view capacity across the entire enterprise or for a specific location or gateway and can be used to determine busy-hour call attempts (BHCA) and busy-hour call completions (BHCC) on the network. In addition, the reports provide a view of the effects of call volumes on call performance and help track trends in call setup failure rates. Utilization reports, which include per-interface statistics and identify individual channels, are especially useful for negotiating contracts with service providers.

“Converged Voice over IP technology is becoming mainstream in call centers and in self-service solutions, and we plan to use NetQoS VoIP Monitor to ensure that our customers are getting optimal performance,” said Thomas Harsh, director of application development and monitoring for eLoyalty’s Austin-based Call Center Managed Services group, CCMS. “In addition, the NetQoS Performance Center provides us with one platform to both manage VoIP and ensure that all the other applications across the WAN are meeting expected service levels.”

With NetQoS VoIP Monitor as part of its product suite, the NetQoS Performance Center provides a complete solution for managing an enterprise VoIP system alongside all other business-critical applications by enabling IT professionals to:

Obtain metrics on call signaling/setup protocols
Gauge the quality of voice calls
Measure response times to show the impact of VoIP on existing applications and vice versa
Determine the volume of VoIP traffic across the WAN – including who is using it and when – to ensure adequate bandwidth for VoIP traffic and other business-critical applications
Monitor the health and availability of VoIP devices
Perform active VoIP testing/monitoring via Cisco IP SLA to measure VoIP jitter, latency, and packet loss

VoIP Monitor v1.1, a recent winner of the Unified Communications® Magazine’s 2007 Product of the Year Award, is available now at a starting price of $29,500. The NetQoS Performance Center portal is available to customers at no additional cost with the purchase of one or more NetQoS product modules.

Visitors to VoiceCon Orlando may view a demo of NetQoS VoIP Monitor v1.1 at booth #1305. For more information about VoIP Monitor, go to http://www.netqos.com/solutions/voip_monitor/index.html

Related links:

ebook: Managing VoIP Quality of Experience on Your Network
Webcast: Getting a Grip on VoIP
White Paper: VoIP Quality of Experience: Ensuring Your Network Supports Optimal VoIP Performance
About NetQoS VoIP Monitor
NetQoS VoIP Monitor is a network-based call setup and call quality monitoring product that tracks the call quality users experience, provides alerts on call performance problems, and isolates performance issues to speed troubleshooting and mean time to repair. The product enables network engineers and IP telephony management to assess the performance of their Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CallManager) IP PBX by tracking, evaluating, and reporting on key metrics without deploying server agents or probes. For every call, VoIP Monitor reports on user call quality and the underlying network performance metrics associated with it. VoIP Monitor also breaks out performance data from the IP and PSTN legs of calls that pass through voice gateways traveling to endpoints in the PSTN. This data lets IT organizations know if the network is responsible for less-than-optimal call quality.
About the NetQoS Performance Center
The NetQoS Performance Center product suite provides global visibility, via a single Web-based management console, into the key metrics necessary to quantify network performance across an organization: end-to-end performance, traffic flow analysis via Cisco® IOS® NetFlow and IPFIX, device performance, long-term packet capture and analysis, and VoIP performance. The NetQoS Performance Center integrates the metrics in customized views to help organizations be more effective in capacity planning, troubleshooting, and service level management. With its role-specific views for different groups in an IT organization, such as network engineering, operations, and IP telephony management, the NetQoS Performance Center enables staff at all levels to:

Measure end-user application response times
Provide consistent application service delivery
Track VoIP quality metrics to ensure VoIP quality of experience
Understand how infrastructure changes affect network and application performance
Isolate performance problems to the application, server, or network
Identify the applications and users consuming bandwidth, and when
Avoid unnecessary WAN costs
Manage the convergence of voice, video and data
Identify virus or denial of service attacks

About NetQoS Inc.

NetQoS software and services help service providers, government agencies, and large enterprises – including half of the Fortune 100 – improve the delivery of applications over wide area networks by enabling them to monitor application service levels, troubleshoot problems quickly, and plan for change. Representative NetQoS customers include Chevron, Lockheed Martin, American Express, Hilton Hotels, Siemens, Boeing, Deutsche Telekom, NASA, and Barclays Global Investors. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, NetQoS has R&D centers in Austin and Raleigh, N.C., and regional sales offices in London and Singapore. For more information, visit www.netqos.com or call (877) 835-9575.

NetQoS is a registered trademark of NetQoS Inc. All other trade names, trademarks, and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.