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Engineer voip

VoIP Network Monitoring Workshop Wrapup

VoIP Network Monitoring workshop learnings

Terrific VoIP Network Monitoring workshop on Tuesday. Ended up with around 25 engineers in the room. Who would have thought that 3 hours would whizz by when talking about this subject? Thanks to all who came especially Raph from Netaxis, Ade and Ben from Zen Internet and Florian from Oracle. They all did a sterling performance with their respective demos.

These small workshops are great. You always learn something new and there are a lot of nuances to this subject. I found a particularly useful feature on the Netaxis Nemo tool (OK I am with Netaxis but it is an useful feature:) ) Nemo can correlate CDR data with the traces and logs of the call being made. It is therefore very easy to track down a recording that may have been made using a network probe based on the number of the calling party. Handy in situations such as call centres where someone may ring back and complain that what they got was not what they asked for previously.

I think the biggest issue this industry is going to have with VoIP Network Monitoring is in the move to the cloud. Currently for anything more than a low number of sessions it isn’t particularly practical to monitor RTP traffic in the cloud. Data throughputs mean you need physical network TAPs to mirror the traffic and the cloud ain’t physical is it. Picture the scene. A massive AWS datacentre with rows and rows of identical cabinets but with one TAP sticking out like a sore thumb.

If all you want is signalling data you will probably be ok but most network managers want to be able to listen to real media when troubleshooting problems.

Afterwards we all trooped to Craft Beer on Mitre Street and then on to The Lahore Kebab House on Commercial Road. This curry house is a real find. Great food. No booze but you can bring your own from the off license next door. I especially recommend the chicken tikka and lamb chops. If you’re ordering onion bhaji that’s a meal in itself.

I digress. Get in touch if you want to know more about what we can offer in the way of VoIP Network Monitoring. Or anything else in the VoIP network game really 🙂

Next workshop is about Session Routing Engines on Wednesday 26th April. Exciting eh? Save the date. More deets to follow.

Thanks to Oracle and Netaxis for the food and drink afterwards 🙂

Trefor Davies

By Trefor Davies

Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com

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