IP Telephony

Ipswitch (News - Alert) announced the availability of its WhatsUp Gold VoIP Monitor plug-in, which enables network managers to determine, monitor and report on the capacity of a network, in order to support and maintain acceptable performance for VoIP call quality.

 

The company develops and markets IT software and allows many people to manage their networks with Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold, transfer files over the Internet using the WS_FTP Professional client and Ipswitch WS_FTP Server, and communicate via Ipswitch IMailTM Server.

 

Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold is a network management solution that is built on a scalable and extensible architecture, providing automated device discovery and network mapping, real-time network monitoring (including SNMP and WMI), and versatile alerting, notification, and reporting functionality.

 

The update includes eight new performance monitor — six for measuring jitter, latency, and packet loss from both source to destination and from destination to source, and two providing values for calculated planning impairment factor (ICPIF) and mean opinion score (MOS).

 

Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold VoIP Monitor accesses information that is generated by Cisco (News - Alert) IP service level agreement (SLA) synthetic calls sent between VoIP devices, eliminates additional load on the network by monitoring the parameters that are essential to VoIP performance such as jitter, packet loss, latency and other calculated performance values.

 

The VoIP Monitor leverages the core services of WhatsUp Gold version 12. The monitor can seamlessly integrate with flexible network management capabilities, thereby offering customers with combined data and voice networks with 360 degree visibility, actionable intelligence and complete control for VoIP.

 

The VoIP monitor incorporates a configurable active monitor for MOS (mean opinion score). This provides scoring data and also can trigger an alert if network degradation causes the MOS value to go below a user configured threshold.

 

"We've been so happy using WhatsUp Gold to manage our IT network that we regularly recommend it to our clients," said Terry Wood, vice president of information technology at Intelek Technologies, in a statement. "Intelek was an early adopter of VoIP technology, and we now rely on our converged network to serve over 5,000 customers, 24 hours a day. The new VoIP Monitor plug-in for WhatsUp Gold gives us insight we never had before and will help us ensure our network is always able to provide suitable quality of service for both data and voice traffic."

 

Ipswitch’ WhatsUp VoIP Monitor also features a Configuration Wizard. The wizard is a configuration utility that can scan the WhatsUp Gold database for IP SLA enabled devices. It also allows the user to select an IP SLA source device for gathering VoIP RTT (round-trip time) data. The wizard then steps through the set up for VoIP performance monitors, workspace views, and active monitors for the selected IP SLA devices.

 

WhatsUp VoIP Monitor also features Workspace View that is a unified view of VoIP performance metrics. The workspace view is fully integrated with the management and reporting infrastructure of WhatsUp Gold product family. All VoIP data is presented in a single workspace view thereby facilitating the user to have full knowledge into the underlying WhatsUp Gold functionality. This facilitates in troubleshooting network issues that could affect VoIP performance.

 

"WhatsUp Gold is the only network management platform that scales from the small business to the large enterprise, so you won't outgrow it as your network expands in size or complexity," said Ennio Caboni, vice president of sales for Ipswitch Network Management Division, in a statement.

 

Caboni added: "Now, with the VoIP Monitor and the other plug-in modules on our product roadmap, WhatsUp Gold customers can extend the functionality of this industry-leading network and application monitoring solution to unprecedented levels."

 

WhatsUp VoIP Monitor is a plug-in to WhatsUp Gold product family and thereby requires a base installation of WhatsUp Gold v12 or above.