Managing visibility of UC deployments can pre-empt disruptions

ThousandEyes tracks both SIP and RTP layers to avoid issues

Network intelligence company ThousandEyes has released two new products to improve visibility on corporate networks. Customers can use Voice Call Tests and Sessions Initiation Protocol (SIP) Server Tests to monitor the performance of on-premises and hybrid VoIP and UCaaS deployments.

SIP is the first step in a voice call, where both endpoints (caller and callee) establish the ‘rules of engagement'. The endpoints register with an SIP server, agree on the media capabilities of the call (like the voice codec) and then start talking directly through a real-time protocol (RTP) layer. Managing both SIP and RTP stages is necessary to ensure the quality of a call.

"The UCaaS market as a whole is transitioning from the ‘early adopter phase' to the ‘early mainstream phase' for enterprise delivery," said a Gartner report on the unified communications market in 2016. "Many UCaaS providers now support global deployments spanning multiple regions (for example, 30 or more country markets)."

VoIP, still the most common form of UC services, is also the most prone to performance issues, which can be caused by factors such as packet loss, jitter and latency. ThousandEyes says that traditional monitoring approaches identify issues ‘after the fact' (relying on packet capture and call detail record analysis'); they also ‘fail to provide any visibility of service performance outside of the enterprise network.'

ThousandEyes claims that its new testing products deliver visibility at all stages of the call, which is important for an organisation moving to cloud-based delivery. It actively simulates voice calls across internal and external networks to baseline performance; this can be used to model expected behaviour and identify issues.

Simon Von Winkle, senior cloud network specialist at Mitel (which took part in the beta tests of the new products), said, "As more of our customers move to cloud-based communications, we need to ensure that their transition is seamless while leveraging our platform. ThousandEyes' Network and SIP Server Tests allow us to proactively monitor our global cloud infrastructure, providing a clear and concise way of determining the root cause of issues… ThousandEyes has enabled our network operations and support teams to add value to our customer experience and have additional confidence resolving troubles and reducing mean time to repair."

Archana Kesavan, product marketing manager at ThousandEyes, wrote a detailed blog post about how the new tests work.

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