Voice QoS Monitoring tool

[bkhanal1971]

Is there a good QoS monitoring tool for monitoring voice quality issues other than Wireshark? We have a centralized CUCM 11.x cluster with over 100 remote sites connected either through MPLS or dmvpn. Those remote sites use centralized SIP trunk for PSTN calls. Sometimes voice quality gets degraded so bad that it is hard to understand what the other party is saying. As a voice admin, I am often asked to find out where the issue but i have no clue how to find it. So if someone could tell me what tools are available there that i could use to proactively monitor the voice quality issues, that would be a great relief to me.

Thanks, Khanal

[Dennis Mink · Accepted solution]

If feel your pain, there is no silver bullet when it comes to QoS and voice quality.

you will need to make sure you have a network tool that has insight in round trip times so you are able to narrow the problem down, in addition netflow is great. and make sure you monitor the utilisation of your QoS maps and see if you drop dscp and af (RTP and video). for which you can use SNMP to poll an OID in the MIB.

hope this helps

[Jitender Bhandari · Accepted solution]

Hi Khanal.

To begin with i can tell you that at the end of they day you would need Wireshark data for an active call where you got Voice quality issue. Also CUCM is a signaling device which means RTP would not traverse through CUCM till the time you have a Media Resource invoked which resides on CUCM example MTP , annunciator Software Conference bridge etc.

Check below things

1) First think first, Isolate the problem call flow, and all hops the Packet \ Frame would go through.

2) Setup end to end PCAP to find packet loss and eliminate one device at time if possible. For example if the RTP packet flow is below

IP Phone -- Access Switch -- Core Switch -- Access Switch --- Router (Gateway) --- PSTN

You setup capture at IP Phone and Router (Gateway) you dont see any packet loss, it means some issue on service provider end, if you are seeing  packet loss, then start looking at one hop at a time.

3) You Can pull CMR data from CUCM 

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/cucm/service/11_5_1/car/CUCM_BK_C72B9385_00_cdr-analysis-and-reporting_1151/CUCM_BK_C72B9385_00_cdr-analysis-and-reporting_1151_chapter_0100011.html?bookSearch=true

Again it would be tough but wireshark is the best you got at that point.

(Rate if it helps)

JB