The bloggers at Network Performance Daily and the team at NetQoS would like to wish you and your family a Happy Holiday.

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May you have a joyous and safe holiday,
May you get everything on your wish list (including the Wii),
May you keep the spirit of the holiday in you all year round,
And most importantly, may this be the one vacation this year
where you don’t get paged in the middle of the night to fix something.

For those of you who read the blog from Austin, enjoy this handy Google Mashup Map of Austin Holiday lights. For the rest of you: Don’t forget to enter our Get Your Network in Shape for 2008 resolutions contest for a chance to win a Wii, a Tom Tom navigation system or an iPod Nano 8GB.

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You can’t measure the quality of a VoIP call without having a set of metrics. While traditional TCP application performance metrics – like transaction time and throughput – are important, they may be difficult to relate to the user experience with the VoIP phone system. There are some user experience metrics that relate directly with call setup performance, however.

First, there’s the delay to the dial tone. In a VoIP system, the phone has to send a message to the call server letting the server know that the phone is off the hook. The call server then sends a message back to the phone telling it to play the dial tone. The time it takes for the message to be sent and the response received is the delay to dial tone.

Continue reading "VoIP Management Series: Key VoIP Call Setup Metrics" »

It’s important to understand each call setup protocol in a VoIP system, because each different call type can involve different components and different protocols.

First, there is On-Net calling, which takes place between two IP phones on the same logical network. In this scenario, the phones use setup protocols like SIP or SCCP to interact with a call server to set-up and take down each phone call. These types of calls are entirely IP based – they’re carried on the network and do not have to go out to the PTSN.

The simplest On-Net scenario, Intracluster Calling, means that both phones are on the same call server or cluster of call servers.

Continue reading "VoIP Management Series: VoIP Call Setup Protocols" »

Often when looking at VoIP quality, people focus on what happens after your call goes through – crackles, drop-outs, and delay aren’t fun, but they’re only half of what you need to worry about with VoIP rollouts.

The VoIP experience begins not with “Hello” but with “eeeeeeeeeeeee.” It begins when you pick up the handset and get a dial tone. The quality of experience of the overall phone systems is shaped not only by the quality of the voice on the other end, but also the availability that the system provides.

Continue reading "VoIP Management Series: VoIP Call Setup Performance" »

Submit Your Network Performance Management Resolutions for 2008 by January 3rd and Win a Nintendo Wii, TomTom or iPod

Over the past year, Network Performance Daily readers have submitted some of the best ideas and fodder for blog posts. We’ve written about everything from IT politics in Fingerpointing, Frustrated Network Engineers, and the Application Performance Blame Game to technical challenges in Echo In Voice over IP Systems, and the difficulties in changing behavior in God Help the Help Desk.

Continue reading "Get Your Network in Shape for 2008 With the Network Performance Daily Reader Contest" »

The underlying network metrics that affect VoIP call quality are packet loss, jitter, and latency, and if you have good network performance for traditional networked applications, it is not a guarantee that performance will be good for VoIP applications. The real-time characteristics of voice create very strict requirements for network performance.

For example, an inappropriately configured network could have calls that are delayed, dropped, or just plain sound bad. These call quality issues would quickly affect the end-user experience because telephone usage is very user-intensive.

Continue reading "VoIP Management Series: VoIP Management and Network Performance – Part 2" »

Anytime you add a new application to the network, unexpected results (if not outright chaos on the order of the fall of the tower of Babel) often ensue. VoIP is no different and can affect network performance particularly. This is why efficient VoIP management is so important.

Most traditional networked application performance – email, ERP, Web, and database applications, have a few key assumptions. They usually use the TCP protocol, which is reliable and sacrifices time for accuracy, changing for new network conditions. They can usually tolerate packet loss (because of the TCP protocol’s ability to recover) and delay (because there’s no need for real-time throughput.) Applications slow down, but are still usable.

Continue reading "VoIP Management Series: VoIP Management and Network Performance – Part 1" »

We’ve been blogging with excerpts from our new VoIP Performance ebook here on Network Performance Daily. Today, Brad Reese gets into the game with his own advice on monitoring VoIP performance using Cisco NetFlow and IP SLA in a story on his Cisco Subnet blog called Are you Taking Advantage of NetFlow and IP SLA?

Brad quotes NetQoS CEO Joel Trammell on the subject. According to Joel, “the number one killer of voice traffic is network latency and jitter. Latency, jitter and packet loss cause poor audio quality and dropped calls. Latency caused by overloaded call managers or network congestion can be a major cause of poor VoIP performance."

Continue reading "Cisco IPSLA and NetFlow Help Network Managers Monitor VoIP Performance" »

NetQoS customers are in for a powerhouse educational event next year. The newly revamped NetQoS Customer Symposium is slated to be held April 20 – 23 at the Barton Creek Resort in Austin, Texas. We’ve completely redesigned the agenda to accommodate lots of new network performance best practices, tutorials, and hands-on lab time. We’re also signing up some big name speakers and counting on Dr. Jim Metzler, again this year, to dazzle us with thought-provoking new findings in the area of Application Delivery. If you’re interested, follow NetQoSLive on Twitter to track new developments and speakers as they sign on.

Based on lots of great customer feedback, we’ve expanded the conference from three to four tracks so that attendees have more options. And, we heard you loud and clear: 2008 will be all about network performance best practices. A “birds of a feather” session has also been added to the agenda so you can discuss the topics that interest you the most in a focused group. The NetFlow® training has been condensed to a four hour boot camp, allowing you to hone your traffic analysis skills in a shorter amount of time. As always, you will receive extensive training on NetQoS products with new topics on WAN Optimization, Packet-Level Forensics, VoIP Monitoring, and others.

Continue reading "Shaking Up Network Performance Training and the Annual NetQoS Symposium. Follow the Developments on Twitter." »

Eight questions that will help you decide when it’s time to replace IT management products

With rapid technology growth and constant change we often lose focus on some of the products we purchased years ago, may not really understand their true cost, or really give much thought to better alternatives. This is particularly true in the case of some older management products that have become commoditized.

Every year, companies renew exorbitant maintenance contracts for dormant products from vendors that barely have a trained support rep on the other end of the phone. Such products have often been acquired as a cash cow and parent vendors starve their development, choosing high margins over more customer-centric advantages like taking advantage of new standards and protocols or integration with new architectures or solutions. Ah, the power of incumbency.

Continue reading "Old Technology and the Danger of Incumbency" »