Telnet Blog 
As promised in March, Videotron has launched its highest speed cable broadband package to date, offering 200Mbps/30Mbps download/upload connections under the ‘Ultimate Speed Internet 200’ banner in Quebec City. The DOCSIS 3.0-based package gives consumers monthly data transfer limits up to 200GB for downloads and up to 50GB for uploads, and costs CAD199.95 (USD197.20). A version of the package is also available for business users.
Case Study by the US Department of National Defense of how they built a solution to support 40,000 Department of Defense personnel from a central command center. When you are working with one of the most demanding and security conscious customers in the world, you’d better know what’s happening on your network. This webinar profiles a recent use case where ensuring the validity of the data traveling on the network, and delivering time-sensitive information without delays was absolutely critical. Net Optics Tap technology provided the answer this Defense Contractor was looking for and proved mighty enough to conquer the needs of this demanding customer.
End to End transaction is the new gold standard out there, replacing legacy “infrastructure/resource” monitoring. The application monitoring market is currently growing at about 15% vs. the overall IT market at 3.7%. So what is driving all this growth!!!
All these factors are making it harder to determine overall performance, and have created barriers to visibility. So for today’s mission critical applications you need to understand what your current baselines are for each application, increase your visibility into the actual end to end transaction performance, and determine what components are causing the anomalies in application performance.
A common stumbling block in monitoring VoIP occurs when the network team misconfigures or fails to define the VoIP setup process for their monitoring system. The results can be serious when you investigate a call and it doesn’t appear, it has been misidentified, or mistakenly combined with another call. Here are five steps to ensure your VoIP monitoring solution is set up for success.
Depending upon the VoIP vendor and system, different components may be involved in the call. For example, in Cisco’s® systems, communications occur between phones and the call manager. Avaya® uses multiple components including the phone, control processor (C-LAN), and media processor (MedPro). Before configuration, map out all components involved in the call.
The first step in configuration is to specify how the monitoring system recognizes a call has been initiated. The option you choose will depend upon the probe's ability to view the call setup packets. Observer offers flexibility dealing with this issue. New calls can either be identified from setup packets or via RTP data packets. Calls can be closed if no packets are identified for a specified time period.
Depending on how calls are communicated and the data involved, the user also needs to specify the traffic type and whether calls occur concurrently. For instance, Avaya systems use MedPro to send RTP data to other MedPro systems and to phones. Multiple calls can be sent and received at the same time.
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Components involved in the call should be identified and configured. Within Observer® under the Device IP Addresses tab, identify the device IP and type. This is critical for dictating how things are measured and displayed.
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If SIP data is encrypted, it can be nearly impossible to identify a call. Depending on your monitoring solutions, you may have the ability to track encrypted traffic. Observer decrypts SIP traffic and provides quality metrics on the fly once it has the appropriate security certificate.
The location of caller ID info varies by system and even components. To be sure the caller is properly identified, your network analyzer needs the location of ID details. In Observer, under the Caller ID Determination tab, users can establish a hierarchical set of rules to locate the sources of ID text.
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Contact Center quality is elusive. You know it when you hear it but how do you define it, measure it and support it? While most contact centers today have an established quality management process in place, forward-thinking organizations keep asking these questions to ensure that their quality program is an integral part of their company’s sales and service and customer satisfaction strategies that delivers real business value.
Many contact centers have not changed their quality process since it was first introduced. You need to ask – Is your process still aligned with your current objectives? Does it meet the changing needs of your customers and your employees?
The good news is that it is never too late to review your quality process. It is important to recognize whether your organization is simply completing a performance measurement process, or truly adding value. Every Quality program needs to be assessed regularly to ensure it is fair, objective, easy to understand, easy to use and delivering the desired results. If not, now is the time to make change. Implementing best practices and evaluating the entire customer experience will deliver business benefits that go well beyond improving agent performance.
An effective quality monitoring program is an iterative process designed to:
And, ultimately improve the consistency and quality of customer interactions across all contact channels to enhance the customer’s experience.
If your current quality program is not delivering value in all of these areas, then now is the time to step back and reassess. After this session, you’ll know if you have all the right elements in place or leave with ideas and information to take your Quality program to the next level.Join us May 17th when Deborah and Jane will share with you their four-step process for assessing, developing or re-designing all aspects of your quality program.
RSVP to info@callcentres.org. Register early, space is limited.
For more information visit here
PresenTense offers you an alternative to the limited functionality of synchronizing with Microsoft W32Time program. PresenTense, will not only synchronize all of the Windows PCs on the network, but also provides alert notification and a audit trail which is not available from the Microsoft W32Time (Windows Time Service). PresenTense Client and Server software is a has Graphical User Interface (GUI) based program that can provide a primary and back-up time reference for redundancy.
| Client Software | PresenTense Client software synchronizes the PCs to the Time Server and/or another PC on the network that is running the Server software. If the PC can’t reach its Time reference, it can email an alert notification that it can’t be synchronized. PresenTense LAN Time Analyzer is a network time synchronization administrative tool that monitors the time accuracy of all PCs on the network. If a PC exceeds a user-defined accuracy specification, this program can run any exe-based program and can also open a message on the PC’s monitor, alerting to a PC with an error higher than expected and desired |
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Presentense LAN Time Analyzer
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The PresenTense NTP Auditor program provides an audit trail of the PC’s time by comparing the PC’s time to up to three different NTP Time references. This program can provide a continuous print-out for a hard-copy proof that each PC was synchronized at any given moment in time. It also logs this information in a text file sorted automatically by month and day. The time is sampled at set intervals and the error of the PC’s time compared to the reference NTP Time Servers is permanently captured. If the time of the PC is manually set by someone at any time between the scheduled samples, the program automatically triggers an unscheduled sample to permanently log how far off from UTC the PC was manually set and when the event occurred. Once the PC is resynchronized or manually set again, another unscheduled sample occurs again and the time of this occurrence is logged.
Presentense NTP Auditor |
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If you would like to try Presentense for your network you can obtain a free 30 day evaluation trail by contacting us at Telnet Networks at 800-561-4019. You can download you 30 day free trail here
Canadian triple-play cableco Eastlink has launched new ‘super-fast’ cable broadband internet service packages under the names ‘Internet 200’ (200Mbps download) and ‘Internet 80’ (80Mbps download) in the Atlantic Canada region, the company announced Friday. Its premium 200Mbps service is an upgrade from its previous 100Mbps top-speed introduced in 2010, and is initially only available in and around Halifax, Nova Scotia. The company, which is claiming the service is the fastest in Atlantic Canada, added that it will be rolling out the new speeds to markets in Nova Scotia and its other coverage zones during the year ahead.
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Unmask Bandwidth BanditsThe term bandwidth hog makes most network managers consider the usual suspects - from ill-timed backups to illicit P2P use. But bandwidth-stealing applications can be difficult to unmask and simply increasing network capacity won’t solve the problem. So let's discuss three commonly overlooked strategies and scenarios to identify bandits and avoid performance interruptions.
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Network teams assume video conferencing will consume significant bandwidth. While true, the greater impact occurs when ill-prepared network teams assign video and other UC applications the highest possible precedence settings. At first, video consumes a small amount of traffic, but as use expands and high-definition video is implemented, the situation drastically changes. With high-precedence communication programs taking up more pipe, less space is available for critical applications like email and web-based programs. The result? Noticeable performance slowdowns.
No doubt shifting to cloud offers great scalability and availability benefits. But cloud also delivers a host of new challenges. Cloud services shift IT management priorities from the network core to the WAN/Internet connection. IT teams must understand this shift, adequately prepare the network, and adjust management styles - or risk crashing Internet links and existing web services.
When you deploy major applications like Enterprise Resource Management programs involving vendor-hired consultants, they typically run tests to verify proper service functionality. Consultants will generally be selective of test points and coordinate with someone on the application team without network team involvement.
As a consequence, applications will be approved without exhaustive enterprise-wide evaluations. The problem is that adverse performance in many untested locations can jeopardize overall network performance and any promised savings and benefits from the newly implemented program.
Most bandwidth bandits highjack network utilization when network teams fail to take steps during the deployment phase. By fully evaluating the impact of rolling out critical services, you can confirm your network is ready for new services. You also maintain positive user experience and response times with critical legacy applications.
We thank Network Instruments for this Article
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Network Instruments 2012 Annual State of the Network Global Study Offers IT Management Insights
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Network Instruments , just released its Fifth Annual State of the Network Global Study today. The results suggest a potential management storm as IT teams face significant monitoring challenges from multiple forms of cloud computing, as well as substantially increased bandwidth demands.
“While IT teams embrace cloud services and video conferencing as a way to increase cost savings and business flexibility, these technologies introduce new components and environments which make ensuring positive end-user experience all the more challenging,” said Brad Reinboldt, senior product manager of Network Instruments. “The reported lack of monitoring tools, quality metrics, and visibility create serious obstacles that prevent IT from effectively managing performance and jeopardize costly technology investments.”
While the number of organizations embracing cloud (60%) remains steady compared to last year’s study results, the number of implementations per organization is growing. Most notably were Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and private cloud deployments -- which grew by 10% over the last year. On average, respondents expected one-third of their applications to be running in the cloud within 12 months.
Seventy-four percent of respondents indicated their chief concern about cloud migration was ensuring corporate data security. The number is nearly double that of last year, and may be the primary reason for slowing cloud adoption by new organizations. Other top concerns included lack of accurate end-user experience monitoring and the bandwidth impact of cloud services.
Although challenging from a monitoring and visibility perspective, one-third of organizations indicated application availability increased as a result of cloud migration.
After many false starts, enterprise video conferencing is now mainstream. Video conferencing has been implemented by 55%, with an expected 70% within a year. Nearly two-thirds of these organizations have implemented multiple deployments throughout their organization. These include standard conference rooms (75%), desktop PCs (63%), and telepresence systems (30%).
While video is clearly embraced, several cited challenges that could hinder wider adoption. Inadequate user knowledge and training was viewed as the largest concern in ensuring a positive video conference experience (53%). This was followed by difficulties allocating and monitoring bandwidth (47%), and a lack of tools to manage video performance (47%).
Further compounding these issues are the lack of standardized metrics to monitor video quality. Network professionals typically relied on a mix of metrics to assess quality, including latency (76%), packet loss (69%), and jitter (60%). Surprisingly, less than one in five use Video MOS, a metric specifically designed to determine video quality.
By the beginning of 2013, nearly one-quarter of respondents expect video to consume over half of their bandwidth.
As applications become more complex and tiered, the ability to resolve service delivery issues grows. Eighty-three percent of respondents said the largest application troubleshooting challenge was identifying the problem source. Whereas, more than two-thirds of respondents predicted network traffic demands would increase by 25%-50% within two years.
The State of the Network Global Study has been conducted annually for five years. This year, Network Instruments engaged 163 network professionals to understand and quantify new technology adoption trends and daily IT challenges. Respondents were asked, via third-party web portal, to answer a series of questions on the impact, challenges, and benefits of cloud computing, video conferencing, and application performance management.
The results were based on responses by network engineers, IT directors, and CIOs in North America, Asia, Europe, Africa, Australia, and South America. Responses were collected from October 22, 2011 to January 3, 2012.
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