ThousandEyes Expands Network Monitoring to Include Voice Over IP

Operations teams can quickly correlate VoIP performance to network infrastructure and routing changes

ThousandEyes, the company redefining network performance management, today announced the general availability of Voice-Over-IP (VoIP) monitoring, thereby expanding the portfolio of applications that network operations teams can monitor and troubleshoot. ThousandEyes VoIP monitoring extends performance visibility across corporate networks, the Internet and wide area networks (WANs) so companies can quickly identify and resolve call issues with minimal disruption to their daily business.

Enterprises are increasingly replacing fixed telephone lines with VoIP, making VoIP a critical application for operations teams to manage. With many branch offices, wired and wireless networks, and data traversing corporate backbones and the Internet, VoIP service degradation has been tricky to troubleshoot. The move to cloud-based Unified Communications (UCaaS) increases the reliance on multiple networks and service providers. Traditional VoIP monitoring solutions track quality metrics, but often fail to pinpoint exactly where in the network a problem is located or to correlate performance to underlying network changes.

ThousandEyes brings a unique approach to VoIP monitoring, with detailed path visualization that helps operators identify exactly which network devices and interfaces are responsible for quality and availability issues. This gives operators deep insight into VoIP traffic that they've never had before, extending visibility across corporate networks as well as the public Internet. Enterprise IT teams can use VoIP monitoring for both inter-office connections over the WAN as well as circuits that connect back to call managers in the data center or UCaaS systems in the cloud. VoIP providers themselves can ensure that their voice services meet SLAs from points around the globe.

"As businesses make use of more and more network-accessed, business-critical services, ThousandEyes continues to redefine traditional network performance management and keep apace," said Peter Christy, Research Director, Networking at 451 Research. "ThousandEyes VoIP performance monitoring offers an innovative and forward-thinking approach to ensuring communications service quality as more businesses move away from traditional telephony and onto the Internet."

ThousandEyes VoIP monitoring tracks call quality, such as loss, jitter, and mean opinion score (MOS). VoIP monitoring includes path visualization overlays to map how routing affects voice calling experience. The path view can particularly help network engineers troubleshoot QoS (Quality of Service) by verifying MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) routing throughout the WAN.

"Due to its real-time nature, VoIP is one of the most intolerant applications when it comes to network performance degradation and network packet loss or jitter will trash a voice call, frustrating end-users and starting blame games in order to fix the problem," said Ricardo Oliveira, CTO of ThousandEyes. "ThousandEyes VoIP monitoring helps customers quickly identify the cause of QoS degradation, providing a hop-by-hop view of the path traversed by voice packets across different networks, including the Internet, which makes this capability one of a kind. This is the first in a series of new voice monitoring capabilities we have planned."