How Cisco Actively
Manages Voice
Availability and Quality
Cisco IT automated daily
testing
Cisco IT Case Study
March 2010
Cisco_IT_Case_Study © 2008 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.
Cisco Public
1
Overview
 Challenge
Identify Voice Issues Before They Affect Users
 Solution
Use Unified Operations Manager for Service-Level Monitoring of all
System Elements
Measure Voice Quality with Cisco Unified Service Monitor
 Results
Improved Voice Service Availability and Quality
 Next Steps
Become Even More Proactive
Cisco IT Case Study
2008 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.
Cisco Public
2
Challenge
Identify Voice Issues Before They Affect Users
• In 2009, Cisco IT managed 200,000 IP phones in 500
buildings in 90 countries
• Source of issue might be any of 15 Cisco Unified
Communications Manager servers, and countless
switches and routers along the way
• Custom scripts for network testing took time to learn
and was labor-intensive, delaying issue discovery
Cisco IT Case Study
2008 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.
Cisco Public
3
“We wanted to be proactive rather than waiting
to react to user complaints.”
Jon Heaton, Unified Communications Architect, Cisco
Cisco_IT_Case_Study © 2008 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.
Cisco Public
4
Solution
Use Cisco Unified Operations Manager for ServiceLevel Monitoring of all System Elements
 Cisco IT generates 200,000 synthetic calls daily
Cisco IT Case Study
2008 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.
Cisco Public
5
Solution
Cisco IT Set Up Thresholds for Alerts
Cisco IT Case Study
2008 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.
Cisco Public
6
Solution
Measure Voice Quality with Cisco Unified Service
Monitor
 Cisco Unified IP Phones record jitter and packet loss and calculate
a Mean Opinion Score
 Cisco Unified Communications Manger transmits the MOS to
Cisco Unified Service Monitor
Cisco IT Case Study
2008 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.
Cisco Public
7
Solution
Cisco 1040 Sensors Estimate Voice Quality for Cisco
Unity and Cisco Unified MeetingPlace Servers
Cisco IT Case Study
2008 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.
Cisco Public
8
Results
Improved Voice Service Availability and Quality
 Cisco IT has used the Cisco Unified Communications
Management Suite to:
• Solve intermittent outage affecting voicemail
• Identify a misconfigured dial plan
• Identify a media translation issue affecting softphones
• Isolate the cause of dropped calls to a call-routing vendor’s
network
• Identify a handful of switches with incorrectly applied QoS
• More
Cisco IT Case Study
2008 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.
Cisco Public
9
Next Steps
Become Even More Proactive
 Increase use of built-in alerting features in the suite
 Detect long-term trends using Cisco Unified Service
Statistics Manager
 Will help to plan capacity upgrades for gateways and routers
 Simplify Unified Communications service provisioning
using Cisco Unified Provisioning Manager
Cisco IT Case Study
2008 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.
Cisco Public
10
To read the entire case study or
additional Cisco IT case studies on a
variety of business solutions, visit
Cisco on Cisco: Inside Cisco IT
www.cisco.com/go/ciscoit
Cisco IT Case Study
2008 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.
Cisco Public
11
Cisco IT Case Study
2008 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.
Cisco Public
12