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Performance Management for Converged Networks

Learn about assessing, planning, verifying, and monitoring converged networks to optimize voice services. Understand the impact analysis, VoIP quality monitoring, and case studies for effective network management.

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Performance Management for Converged Networks

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  1. Performance Management for Converged Networks

  2. Today’s Focus • Converged network challenges • Meeting the challenges throughout Lifecycle - Assess- Plan- Verify- Monitor • Summary

  3. Convergence Challenges • Primary Business Concern • High level of expectations surrounding voice services • Technical • Adding complexity to already very complex enterprise networks • Voice traffic competing for existing network resources • Voice is a real-time application, i.e., sensitivity to delay, jitter and packet loss • Setting appropriate traffic prioritization (QoS) to ensure VoIP and other mission-critical applications are delivered properly, providing the best user experience

  4. Management Lifecycle • Assessment • Have you baselined your network? Is it ready for Voice? • Planning • Have you made all necessary decisions to ensure an effective rollout? • Impact analysis • Is everything running as smoothly as planned? • Ongoing management • How is your network changing and growing over time?

  5. Step One: Assessment Is your network ready for Voice? • Create an inventory of all applications on the network • Needed for creating QoS policies and making capacity and usage policy decisions • Evaluate bandwidth to ensure capacity for Voice • Understand network utilization to determine areas with too little capacity • Identify how business sites use network resources • Baseline the response time of key business applications • Audit the network for subtle, systemic problems • Identify issues that may impact a VoIP deployment “No matter how well architected your network is,once voice is added, any idiosyncrasy is bound to appear.”

  6. How does business use the network? Do you know all the applications running on your network? Application visibility provides business justification for IT decisions:Are there good reasons for an upgrade? Are there non-business uses of the network?

  7. Baseline RT of key business apps A pre-deployment snapshot of response time can be used as a comparison post-deployment to ensure voice does not negatively impact delivery of key business applications Response time provides insight into the end-user experience and should be an integral part of any performance management tool

  8. Step Two: Planning Have you made all decisions to ensure an effective rollout that minimizes the impact on end users? Based on gathered data… • Fine-tune capacity and implement needed upgrades • Investigate and troubleshoot subtle problems • Establish post-deployment alarm thresholds • Establish and implement QoS policies

  9. Fine-tune capacity, implement upgrades What applications contribute to capacity? • Eliminate undesired traffic • Reschedule processes • Redistribute load • Add new bandwidth where required

  10. Step Three: Impact Analysis Is everything running as smoothly as planned? • Confirm voice configuration and quality • Confirm QoS configuration and success • Determine whether voice and bandwidth utilization estimates meet with actual data • Re-evaluate response time of critical applications

  11. VoIP Quality Monitoring • VoIP Link Summary • Counts for all calls & calls failed • Packet loss • Average and peak jitter • Average and lowest MOS value • VoIP Call Detail Records • Name and IP address of initiating & receiving devices • # of calls • # of calls failed • Average connect time • Talk time • Packets lost • Average jitter • MOS

  12. Is voice being delivered as designed? Validation Monitor call jitter, packet loss percentage, and setup times to confirm voice performance Validate codec and voice traffic prioritization configurations

  13. Validation, continued QoS configurations set correctly? Applications that have been assigned a wrong DSCP will be quickly identified in this view and will make pinpointing the mis-configured device much easier

  14. Case Study Mis-configured QoS causes problem at hospital • 500 bed hospital in the Western U.S. • VoIP pain point: • Whole wings of the hospital would intermittently deregister and lose telephone service • Thought bandwidth was an issue • Put VoIP on own VLAN • Turned off multicast backups • Problem persisted • “If you can solve this problem, we can prove your value” • VoIP MIB demonstrated mismatch in QoS for RTP voice • – Inbound class was 46; outbound was 0 • Reconfigured routers & problem resolved.

  15. Step Four: Management How is your network changing + growing over time? • Converged networks need unified performance management • Continuation of the tasks you performed in assessment and post-deployment impact phases • Early warning of pending issues • Communication to key constituents

  16. Need For Unified Management Context to performance problems enables faster troubleshooting: Voice doesn’t exist alone on the network. Make sure your performance management solution can display needed information side-by-side

  17. Advanced, Early Warning Catch changes in network behavior before they affect the business: Detect increases and decreases in link and application utilization, application response time, VoIP quality, and unknown applications.

  18. Capacity Planning Long-term views provide trending information: Monitor the “Over Time” views to gain an indication of voice quality degradations and to facilitate more accurate capacity planning.

  19. Live, web-based Workspaces for intuitive troubleshooting. Navigate with a right-click. Create on-demand reports from customized Workspaces and publish to NewsPapers. Annotate, rename graphs for business audiences. Publish most-/least- summary articles and custom reports. Drill-down from a NewsPaper article into a live Workspace. Robust Reporting Intuitive reporting: Customize reports to reflect individual needs. Multiple levels of granularity from high-level summaries to meticulous details.

  20. Benefits • Unified information to lower TCO and optimize IT staff productivity • A business perspective of converged, global networks • Improved delivery of networked applications and services

  21. Thank you!! Brian Wilson Principal EngineerNetScout Systems, Inc. www.netscout.com

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