Here in part 4, we take a look at WhatsUp Gold's new plug-in modules—WhatsConnected, NetFlow Monitor, and VoIP Monitor.

by Lisa Phifer President Core Competence [December 30, 2008]

As shown by Parts 1-3 of this review, WhatsUp Gold v12.3.1 is a network-focused discovery and monitoring platform that reports on system and service reachability, availability, and performance. That product's service-level features have grown over the years—most notably WMI polling, built-in Exchange/SQL/NT service monitors, and custom monitor scripts.

In the past, features like these were simply added to the core product. For example, WMI is supported by all but the entry-level Standard Edition. But earlier this year, Ipswitch started to bundle selected upgrades as separately-priced plug-ins. Let's look at what these incremental modules are bringing to the party.

Analyzing voice performance
The VoIP Monitor Plug-In ($995) leverages WhatsUp Gold's SNMP roots by querying Cisco IP SLA-enabled devices (i.e., IOS routers, Catalyst switches) to track and report on critical voice over IP (VoIP) performance metrics.

Devices that support Cisco IOS IP Service Level Agreements (SLAs) can send simulated test traffic from SLA Source to SLA Responder to measure latency, loss, jitter (inter-packet delay variance), quality, and server responsiveness. These measurements enable statistical analysis, helping network planners and operators design, trouble-shoot, and optimize VoIP deployments. To learn more about IP SLAs, see this Cisco Overview.

The WhatsUp Gold VoIP Monitor Plug-In collects, aggregates, and analyzes these IP SLA measurements, using the WhatsUp Gold SNMP monitoring engine for metric collection and its web GUI to present the results (see Figure 1).

To get started, buy a VoIP Monitor plug-in license and refresh your WhatsUp Gold license to activate Cisco IOS IP SLA monitoring and reporting features. We couldn't exercise this plug-in because our test network did not include IP SLA-enabled routers. But if your network does, your next step would be to configure those SLA Source and Responder devices to generate VoIP metrics. For example, use the Cisco IOS CLI to update your Source router's config like this:

Rtr(config)# ip sla 200
Rtr(config-sla)# type jitter dest-ipaddr 192.168.0.2
Rtr(config-sla)# dest-port 16384
Rtr(config-sla)# codec g711alaw
Rtr(config-sla)# tag SiteA to SiteB
Rtr(config)# exit
Rtr(config-sla)# ip sla schedule 200 life forever start-time now

After configuring SLA Sources and Responders, use the WhatsUp Gold console to run the VoIP Monitor Configuration Utility (see Figure 2). This wizard configures a Mean Opinion Score (MOS) Active Monitor for each round-trip path that you want to measure. Active Monitor results are then analyzed and displayed by a new VoIP workspace view, created for one web GUI user and optionally extended to other users.

The VoIP workspace offers several new WhatsUp Gold report types. For example, Figure 3 depicts Mean Opinion Score (MOS) and ICPIF (Calculated Planning Impairment Factor) gauges. These industry metrics are commonly used to score voice call quality (1=very annoying; 5=excellent) and overall packet loss/delay (55=complaints likely; 5=very good). New VoIP reports can also chart discrete VoIP metrics like one-way jitter, latency, and percent packet loss (source to destination, destination to source).

We can see how these VoIP performance reports would make WhatsUp Gold even more useful for organizations with Cisco routers and switches located near VoIP endpoints. Whether crunching these metrics through WhatsUp Gold is worth the plug-in price really depends on the size/criticality of your own VoIP deployment.

1. Analyzing voice performance

2. Monitoring traffic flows

3. Mapping link-layer connectivity