[cisco-voip] VoiP Monitoring

[Alex Balashov]

You need to clarify exactly what you mean by "monitor," "failure" and 
"degradation" before it is possible to say with any certainty whether 
there is anything off the shelf that is both feasibly affordable and 
does quite what you are looking for.  In general, my inclination is to 
say no, but it depends on the complexity of your requirements.

It is possible, certainly, to monitor the IP-level status and/or VoIP 
service availability on particular gateways associated with your 
international carriers.  If the elementary disappearance of access or 
reachability to one of these is your definition of "quality 
degradation," then you could create some sort of quality mediation 
gateway using a proxy that runs an agent that periodically polls these 
destinations to check their basic availability.

But this is not very useful, all things considered;  if you are a 
service provider, chances are that your connectivity to your carriers 
doesn't go out very often, and if it does, it is likely to affect your 
reachability to all of them simultaneously and you are going to know 
about it by other means in any case.

What it sounds like you may be looking for, based on your chosen 
phraseology of "monitor all destinations," is a way to determine if the 
carriers are having routing problems (VoIP or TDM) further upstream to 
certain destinations from each carrier.  Unfortunately, without knowing 
the destinations your users will be calling in advance there is no way 
that you can determine whether a particular prefix is successfully 
routable.  There are solutions out there from vendors like Brix Networks 
that will let you generate automatic recurring test calls and even 
measure the apparent received voice quality (as a result of packet loss, 
jitter, etc.) if you know where you want to call, but they are very 
expensive and won't do you much good since most termination failures are 
unexpected and to unpredictable places based on complicated technical 
and logistical supply chains.  I can guarantee you that the price for 
that type of solution won't survive 80/20 rule analysis for what you're 
doing, and that you should shave with Occam's Razor every morning. :-)

-- Alex

Mohit Saxena wrote:

> Can any one suggest me a god software which can automatically monitor
> all the routes and alert my noc of call failures on a particular route
> or prefix. 
> I would like to bring to you here that we are using cissco AS 58xx
> series gateways to route the international calls originating from our
> mobile subscribers.
> We want to monitor all the destinations and want to be allerted
> immidiately on call failurer on a particular route or quality
> degradation on particular route.



-- 
Alex Balashov
Evariste Systems
Web    : http://www.evaristesys.com/
Tel    : (+1) (678) 954-0670
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