I’ve been invited to do a tutorial at VoiceCon Spring in Orlando, FL, March 30, 2009, at 1:30pm: VoIP Troubleshooting, Monitoring, and Metrics.
The topic is an expansion of two of my favorite subjects: Troubleshooting and Network Management. The tutorials are half-day events, broken into two 75-minute sessions. In the first session, I’ll be talking about Troubleshooting common VoIP problems, ranging from basic connectivity problems to echo. At prior Voicecon conferences, I’ve had a short speaking slot in which to cover the subject of troubleshooting. With a short time slot, it is difficult to cover any of the topics in detail and is probably difficult for the attendees to follow at the rapid pace that’s required for a short time slot. So 75 minutes will give me plenty of time to discuss a variety of subjects and give good detail on how to detect the problems and resolve them.
The second half of the session will be about Management and Metrics. If you have a VoIP system, you probably rely on phone calls to let you know that something is amiss with the network. That’s not very proactive. There are a number of things that you can be donig to provide greater visibility into your VoIP system’s operatoin and whether it is healthy or needs attention. Remember, VoIP runs over your coverged (read: combined) data and voice network, so data can impact voice and vice-versa. It sure would be nice to know that you have high delay, jitter, or packet loss before you get calls about poor voice quality. Is QoS properly implemented across your network? How do you know? What do you do about it?
On March 31, 2009, at 8:00am(!) I’m leading a panel discussion titled “Network Management: Finding the Right Tools.” I’ll be challenging the panel members to answer the question of making network management useful to network engineers. I’ve seen a lot of network management tools that are cumbersome and difficult to learn. Some of the tools seem to be made by people who have never watched anyone run a network, much less participated in its operation. For example, why should a tool require you to enter the IP address of every device you want to monitor? That’s a manual process that’s guaranteed to result in some devices never being entered into the system. That thinking adds more to my workload — not exactly what I wanted out of a tool. So bring your pet peeves to the talk and be ready to ask your own questions of the panel members.
I was just checking the VoiceCon web site and noticed that you can save $500 if you register before Feb 20. This event is the one to attend for VoIP related topics. The show floor tends to be well populated with the major vendors and the sessions tend to be good. (There are some shows that I won’t recommend, so this isn’t just a plug for the VoiceCon show because I’m attending.)
See you there!
-Terry
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Re-posted with Permission
NetCraftsmen would like to acknowledge Infoblox for their permission to re-post this article which originally appeared in the Applied Infrastructure blog under http://www.infoblox.com/en/communities/blogs.html
