Wireless Monitoring
Once an installation is up and running, monitoring the service through time to see how consistently it is performing, utilisation and error stats and looking for trends over time would be done by a solution such as NetVoyant.
If you just want to check basic performance stats and ping the access points for availability then the Fluke OVC solution would be sufficient.
VOIP Monitoring
Once the VoIP service is running, monitoring the consistency of the service needs a long term monitoring solution. The NetVoyant solution polls synthetic calls between devices in the network and records the networks ability to support VoIP calls, as well as looking at the real-time call performance activity.
Netflow solutions (ReporterAnalyser) can tell you how much bandwidth VoIP is taking on key network links.
Visual Networks have a dedicated VoIP solution that works in a similar way to the Fluke Reporter Analyser, but also records the MoS scores for delivered calls. This means that it analyses where quality was lost and records the calls made on each link and provides fine detail on those specific problem calls.
WAN/LAN Network Monitoring and Trending
These tools are aimed at Network Designers, Managers etc who are looking at how they are going to provide services over the networks. To achieve these aims you really need a decent amount of history of what’s going on and there can be quite a bit of overlap with troubleshooting tools.
At the entry level, there are simple SNMP tools that produce graphs of port utilisation over long periods of time. These are fine for simple judgements of bandwidth but do not give any useful analysis of how the links are being used. However the software package such as Fluke’s OVC is worthwhile candidate for this application.
At a slightly deeper level; if you want to keep a record of how a network is being used, you have to source the information from specific point on the Network. This usually involves the use of Software or Hardware Probes, or CISCO’s NetFlow technology, to gather the information and then store it in a database over a period of time.
These solutions are aimed at managing the investment in the LAN/WAN by providing high levels of detail, of how the bandwidth is being used, and hence what is the most efficient and economical way to manage it. Products that are well positioned to deliver these solutions would be Flukes Reporter Analyser or Visual Uptime.
