[cisco-voip] re: QoS Toolsets

[Candace Holman]

What version of Qovia are you referring to? I don't have some of these 
features in my installation.

I've tested all three of the products under discussion, and best 
all-around alerting tool so far is NetIQ. Qovia needs a little work to 
provide a way to turn off alerts when the listener decides, not just 
when Qovia sees the condition go away. I get spammed by my own tool 
because it is not adjustable enough (at least not in the version I use). 
We should be able to acknowledge a problem to stop the alerts, 
consolidate alerts, and choose the delivery media. Qovia can only send 
emails or snmp traps. Also the granularity of the MoS metrics is a 
little under par. Qovia doesn't do more than NetIQ, except in one area - 
providing quick, easy and multi-tenant/multi-privilege real-time access 
to phones and call data. This is a hardware solution with a centralized 
server, so you have to cart it out and set it up, and have available a 
span port for each probe.

IMO, NetIQ does more than Qovia, and monitors all kinds of information 
on the CallManagers and gateways, not just the phones. Qovia only seems 
to monitor phones and quite limited data on the gateways and switches. 
NetIQ can send alerts to a variety of media: pages, emails, snmp traps, 
or just log the data.

Candace

Subject:
[cisco-voip] RE: change to Qovia re: QoS Toolsets
From:
"VoIP Forum" <voipforum at apptis.com>
Date:
Thu, 15 Dec 2005 12:29:29 -0500

To:
"Voll, Scott" <Scott.Voll at wesd.org>
CC:
cisco-voip at puck.nether.net


*/This is not a sales pitch, and I get nothing for this…/*

Qovia simply blows Cisco’s current ITEM release out of the water, and 
leaves the awkwardness of Prognosis in the dark.

Cost wise, it is far less expensive than NetIQ in most installations and 
can do so much more.

I my opinion it is the best Cisco VoIP Real-Time management tool there 
is. We use it throughout our entire enterprise VoIP Network and have 
been able to resolve many issues in minutes where we had spent hours in 
the past troubleshooting. The best thing I could say that you may win 
Mgmt over with… “We use it for SLA and QoS mgmt on remote sites. Since 
the probes can simulate traffic to each other across the WAN. Due to 
mitigation of lost call or poor call quality, Qovia pays for itself 
within months instead of years. We have reduced time to roll out new 
sites as well, since we can take a few days worth of testing and put it 
into a few hours worth of active tests using the probes in conjunction 
with Qovia Central.”, and you can quote me on that.

It is 100% off box so there are not compliance and SMARTnet issues, plus 
it utilizes its own DB and does not rely on the CDR which is not 
accessible until after the call has ended. We have it integrated to our 
NMS it sends e-mail pages to us when there is an issue. That let’s us 
actually see the MOS of the active call and on each leg of the call 
while the user is on the call. This is great for real-time circuit 
maintenance; for example, we can tweak llq (QoS) settings while the call 
is up to see if that corrects the issue or not. We can identify bad 
circuits and codec issues, etc… We can look at any services and process 
utilization on the CCMs real-time or historically. We also use Qovia for 
capacity planning.

Another awesome feature is the device inventory reports that will 
actually show you comparisons to see who is moving their phone and from 
where to where. You can run hourly, nightly, weekly, monthly reports and 
they are all useful. We had visiting users grabbing phones off desks and 
moving them wherever, and we could find them with a simple report as 
well as what day it moved to track the culprits down.