Does Dataminer have any pre-built capabilities to monitor the quality of VoIP calls across an IP Wide Area Network ?
Thanks in advance.
Hi Pete,
I personally have less experience with monitoring quality of VoIP calls, but let's see if we can maybe develop this thread and see what your options would be. In general, when it's about testing and monitoring quality of different types of services, there are two options. Either there is a specialized application specific sub-system that performs tests and we integrate with that to ingest the data (to further process it for dashboards, alarming, performance trending, reporting, integration with the end to end service views, etc.), but sometimes if quality related data is already available in certain devices, we can collect that as well, and in some select cases the flexibility of drivers is leveraged to do quite some sophisticated actions that go beyond just data collection. I kind of recalled something about a driver related to SIP calls for example, and found it back in the driver catalog.
And drivers can be quite powerful as you can see to perform all kind of actions and to collect all kinds of data. But again, I'm not an expert in this domain, and I'm not sure what would be needed to monitor the quality of VoIP calls, and which data would be involved, and from where it could be sourced. But maybe this gives you already some ideas about what DataMiner could do. It's not necessarily in the VoIP domain, but we have deployed drivers that also look at IP traffic and extract specific packages and process those to generate specific insights. Not sure if something like that could be useful for you.
Hi Pete,
To add to what Ben is saying, lot depends on the KPI's you like to monitor and the available data sources.
- In the event DataMiner can connect to your Voip (soft)switch or Voip SaaS via API, we'd typically collect data relative the the Voip serice quality and report e.g. Number of active calls, number of call attempts per sec, session setup success ratio, etc. No test / measurement or sensors are required to provide that functionality, the granularity of quality indexes depends on your Voip switch api or SaaS api (are u using a managed service for your voip?)
- In the event you have sensors deployed in the network (to measure jitter / latency, MOS, etc), DataMiner can also 1. ingest data of test but 2. also schedule tests to run (synthetic testing).
- Last, we can retrieve data from the network in order to measure specific IP / TCP level counters and metrics (and filter the info per IF and if relevant to the QoS class u use for voip). Those would include birtrates, jitter, FEC corrected/uncorrected, checksum errors. If you have network services running like Cisco IP SLA, DataMiner can also ingest that data (jitter, latency).
As you can see, DataMiner ingests data, processes (filter, aggregate, analyze behavior and trend changes, alarm, etc) the info and present it in a comprehensive manner to ICT engineers, your SLA engineers for voip, etc.
I'd welcome your feedback to what data sources we can access, and then take this further.
Thx - Steven