Monitoring VoIP traffic with Flow Hopper allows users to easily report on quality of service changes at each hop and also provide users with end to end network visibility. Have you ever found yourself asking, “how do I perform root cause analysis on poor VoIP phone quality?”
Cisco Mediatrace
Cisco Mediatrace enables you to isolate and troubleshoot network degradation problems for data streams and is primarily used with VoIP and video flows. But what if you have multi-vendor or non Cisco related networking hardware?
Flow Hopper™
Flow Hopper™ is a technology that has been designed to provide end to end visibility by leveraging your already existing NetFlow or IPFIX exports from any vendor. The only requirement is next hop must be exported in the flow records. Let’s take a look at how voice and video traffic monitoring with NetFlow or IPFIX and Flow Hopper™ will increase your ROI.
Earlier today I heard one of my colleagues mention that they experienced poor VoIP phone quality, so we began our root cause analysis by running a standard NetFlow bandwidth utilization report on traffic going back to our core network. The report shows a steady amount of traffic and gives us a few spikes and dips to investigate, but it’s hard to determine the root cause.
Since the previous report didn’t show the anomaly, we jumped into Flow Hopper™ to gain end to end visibility on our network from our edge back to the core network.
With end to end visibility, Flow Hopper™ was able to quickly identify that the quality of service, or DSCP value, has changed as the traffic is traversing the network. By painting a picture of the path and examining the flows, Flow Hopper™ was able pinpoint the router in question. Can you guess what was the root cause of the VoIP jitter? The VoIP traffic was was not being tagged with any QoS, so the voice over IP traffic didn’t have any priority!!
If you’d like a demo of how NetFlow traffic analysis can help you monitor your VoIP and video traffic, contact us, we would be glad to help!