Adding a New VoIP Monitor

Prerequisites

When you want to test a link from your office to another location, you need  a Cisco router ( IOS version 12.4 or later )  at each end.

Steps to set up the monitor

Using OpManager Plus, you can now monitor the voice and video quality of a 'call path'. Call path is the WAN link between the router in your main office and the one in the branch office that you want to monitor.

Step 1 :  Enable Add (/discover) the router in your LAN to OpManager Plus. And make sure the SNMP read and write community are configured properly, for that router.

Step 2:   Enable SLA responder on the destination device you wish to monitor, Steps are detailed below.

1. Open a CLI session on the destination router and enable the EXEC mode as follows: 
               
   Router>enable
    
2. Start the global configuration mode:
   
   Router#configure terminal
    
3. Enable the IP SLA responder:
   
   Router(config)#ip sla responder
   [or]
   Router(config)#ip sla monitor responder
   (Note: Enter any one of the command to enable IP SLA responder as it varies according to the IOS versions.)
    
4. Repeat the above steps for all the destination routers on which you want to monitor VoIP performance.

Step 3: Creating the VoIP monitor:

1. Go to Inventory-> Select IPSLA from three line menu ->Select VoIP -> Click on + (add symbol) at the top right corner
2. Enter a name for the monitor
3. Select the source router from the list of routers discovered in OpManager Plus, and select the relevant interface.
4. Specify the destination router either by using the 'Search' option to pick from the discovered routers, or use the 'Add' option to specify the IP address of the destination router and submit the details.
5. You will see the summary of the monitor you are about to configure. Now click 'Save' to submit the details to the device. This will take few seconds to configure.
   Refresh the page after few seconds to see the new monitor. The data will be collected every hour, from the time you have configured.

Configuring call settings and threshold template

Defining Call Settings:

Define a template with the required VoIP settings to be used for monitoring performance. The VoIP template comes with pre-populated default values. Incase you would like to effect some changes to the values before initiating monitoring, make the changes as follows:

1. Go to Admin -> Monitoring - > IPSLA -> Call Settings.
2. Configure the following parameters:
    

Source  Port - Specify the VoIP UDP port to which VoIP Monitor sends simulated traffic to generate performance metrics. The default port number is set as 16384. You can specify a port in the range of 16384 - 32766.

Simulated VoIP Codec - The VoIP jitter codec decides the type of traffic that VoIP Monitor simulates over your network.

Operation Frequency - The operation frequency is the frequency with which QoS metrics are collected by the IP SLA agent on your network to determine performance.

Operation Timeout - The operation timeout is time to wait for the response from the responder / destination device in msecs.

Type of service - The Type of Service octet allows you to set precedence levels for VoIP traffic of the IP SLA operations.

MOS Advantage Factor - The advantage factor is a measure, on a scale of 0 to 20, of the willingness of your VoIP network users to trade call quality for convenience


Defining Thresholds for the monitored parameters:

You can define a threshold template so that the VoIP performance parameters can be better suit your company SLA's (Service Level Agreements). Alerts are triggered based on the thresholds configured so that you can take corrective actions in time. Here are the steps to define a threshold template:

1. Go to Admin -> Monitoring - > IPSLA -> Threshold Template.
2. Configure the following parameters:

MOS Threshold : Configure the MOS threshold by specifying the upper and lower MOS range values in the range of 1 to 5.

Jitter Threshold : Configure the jitter threshold in msecs with upper and lower threshold limits. The range is from 0 to 6000 msecs.

Latency Threshold : Specify the delay allowed in msecs again in the range of 0 to 6000.

Packet Loss : Specify the number of packets that can be lost in transit.

Notification Profile : Select the required notification profile(s) in order to notify when the any threshold rule is violated.

Viewing Top 10 Call Paths

With VoIP Monitor you can view the top 10 call paths by MOS, Packet Loss, Jitter and Latency. This provides you to have a quick view and react proactively. To view the top 10 call paths, follow the steps given below:

1. Go to Inventory-> Select IPSLA from three line menu ->Select VoIP and click on VoIP Monitors.
2. Click on Top 10. The top 10 call paths by MOS, Packet Loss, Jitter and Latency are listed.
3. Click on the required call path view its snapshot page.