Voice Management Leaders Talks the Importance of End-to-End Visibility

Kapoor notes that VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) and UC are "highly dependent on the underlying network they traverse," which means "voice quality and service issues are often caused by a variety of network-related conditions."

Therefore, when problems occur, pity the poor support team working in such a heterogeneous tech environment having to get data from multiple sources and locations routers, gateways, VoIP call servers and UC applications to determine from where the problem originated. As Kapoor says, what’s needed is end-to-end visibility "across every facet of the communications environment, from the SIP trunks at the core to the softphones at the edge."

Still, there will be issues. Voice traffic will suffer from latency, delay and packet loss, and quality will suffer. What’s needed here, Kapoor says, are "voice-specific metrics that provide clear insight into ‘why’ quality." This requires "deep VoIP-specific metrics, just as burst, length and density on a per-call basis, to determine the type of voice issue occurring."

The bottom line

The bottom line, as Kapoor sees it, is that with unified visibility of the entire environment and deep voice metrics, "the complexity of determining where and why communications issues are occurring is significantly reduced."

Recently voice management leader Tone Software announced that its ReliaTel VoIP management offering is compliant with key Internet Protocol telephony offerings from Avaya, a vendor of business collaboration systems, software and services.

The ReliaTel offering provides comprehensive VoIP quality and service level management for converged environments, including real time VoIP QoS and QoE analysis and trunk performance reporting for Avaya Communications Manager through the SAT interface. The ReliaTel RTCP, SNMP, and SAT functionality is now compliance-tested by Avaya for compatibility with: Avaya Aura Communication Manager 6.0.