[cisco-voip] CM/IPT monitoring tools

[Gibson, Brian (Jersey City)]

How does their app work in the 5.1 environment?  I assume they no longer install a shim on the server?  

-----Original Message-----
From: Matthew Saskin [mailto:matt at saskin.net] 
Sent: Thursday, October 11, 2007 12:55 PM
To: Ed Leatherman
Cc: Gibson, Brian (Jersey City); cisco voip list
Subject: Re: [cisco-voip] CM/IPT monitoring tools

I've become more and more intrigued by the NetQoS product - truly one of 
the few out there that can give insight into voice quality *without* 
relying on CDR/CMR's.

Personally, we run Prognosis internally and for all of our clients.  The 
most recent versions (8.1 for CM 4x and 8 for CM5+) are great - I've yet 
to run into any issues with the agent installation as it is on the Cisco 
"whitelist" which is generally taken as gospel.

With prognosis, you can get as granular with alerting as you want - for 
example you can alert at anything down to a specific single phone 
unregistering - bad call quality from a single phone, etc.

Also for what it's worth, we chose prognosis after doing an extended 
bake-off between it, cisco ops manager, and NetIQ.

-matt

Ed Leatherman wrote:
> NetIQ has a product out there also for managing cisco voip, might be 
> worth looking at and comparing too. We're planning on evaluating it 
> probably this spring. We're in the same boat that you are with 
> monitoring and management tools.
> 
> I evaluated Prognosis a couple years ago but I wasn't thrilled with the 
> interface and setup, also at the time it was a agent loaded on CCM which 
> I didnt like. I understand with CM5 they have by necessity a separate 
> agent off of call manager now. Pre-sales/support didn't really give me a 
> warm and fuzzy feeling during our eval either, but that was just my 
> experience and like I said it was a few years ago. Now that I have a 
> better handle on what I want, maybe it would look better to me :) Last 
> time they contacted me they were trying to use the VTech tragedy as a 
> possible sales point, which REALLY turned me off big time.
> 
> We're actually looking at NetQoS now from a performance monitoring 
> perspective enterprise wide (data network, applications group, etc), 
> looks like its very good a performance monitoring obviously, but not 
> sure yet if it will alarm on IP phone registrations and the like yet. 
> Still need to look at their VoIP potion of the product myself.
> 
> We kinda got burned by Ciscoworks initially (before it was ops manager), 
> we got it when we first implemented VoIP as part of the order, not 
> knowing any better and not having any environment to test it out in. 
> I've heard that its improved, but like Hesham said in his email  have 
> never heard any rave reviews of it so evaluating it isn't a priority 
> right now. Also Cisco doesn't seem to offer any software upgrade 
> assurance with their maintenance packages for ciscoworks.. our net 
> operations is running into this with their ciscoworks LMS, so i'm less 
> inclined to buy the voice solution if i'm going to have to buy it all 
> over again later to get new features and improvements to the product.
> 
> On 10/11/07, *Gibson, Brian (Jersey City)* <brian.gibson at stifel.com 
> <mailto:brian.gibson at stifel.com>> wrote:
> 
>     Hi guys,
> 
>      
> 
>     Can you tell me what monitoring tools you use to keep an eye on your
>     CM/IPT system?  RTMT is fine for broad brush stuff but I am looking
>     for tools that are a bit more granular.
> 
>      
> 
>     I have tried the Cisco Operations Manager and find it to be somewhat
>     lacking.   As with most CiscoWorks tools it doesn't seem to have
>     much in the way of fine tuning capability. 
> 
>      
> 
>     More specifically I am looking for tools that can give me specific
>     alerts on PRIs going down, MGCP gateways losing connection, specific
>     phones deregistering.  But I don't want tools that will give me 100
>     alerts an hour.
> 
>      
> 
>     I have tried to get use my SNMP poller(SolarWinds) to check these
>     statuses but I haven't had much luck in finding the right MIBs.
> 
>      
> 
>     Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
> 
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> -- 
> Ed Leatherman
> Senior Voice Engineer
> West Virginia University
> Telecommunications and Network Operations
> 
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