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Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C), and in particular voice and video are a critical part of customer interaction and business operations with expectations for high quality user experience. Consequently, IT teams are under pressure to rectify voice and video performance issues on a priority basis. Therein lies the challenge. UC&C comes with its own inherent complexity demanding increased collaboration within the IT Operations teams who need to manage a growing number of components and servers to deliver voice and video services over the enterprise network, WANs, PSTN and SIP trunks.

Solving UC issues requires the ability to quickly triage and identify the source of the problem. The innovative nGeniusONE® Service Assurance platform makes this possible. Powered by Adaptive Service IntelligenceTM (ASI) technology for real-time, in-depth, smart data, nGeniusONE delivers a common user interface for smart analytics to seamlessly and contextually go from health status in dashboard views to service dependency maps to session analysis and service monitors to precisely pinpoint errors and service disruptions. This provides an in-depth view of service, network, signaling and application performance across complex multi-tier, multi-domain service delivery environments.

Challenges in Troubleshooting Call Servers and Signaling ProtocolsDelivery of UC&C services depends on multiple key devices like network and server components, call servers, and Session Border Controllers (SBCs), to name a few. Managing UC&C relies on

multifunctional teams who typically settle for silo-focused point tools to assure the performance of their specific components in the UC&C service delivery chain.

Siloed management tools lack visibility into the complete picture of the problem including the relationships and interrelated nature of the overall network infrastructure, application services, signaling and enabling protocols necessary to deliver UC&C services, making it difficult to evaluate such things as:

• The interconnect network including Gateways and SBCs

• Service enablers like DNS, RADIUS and Active Directory/LDAP

• Application resource contention

• Server dependencies, e.g. which call manager servers are connected to which voicemail servers

• Application dependencies

• The distributed service delivery environment

The multitude of vendor specific management tools with their own unique interfaces and views of their service components leads to inefficient workflows with time consuming hand-offs where one team attempts to translate and verify the analysis of the other team. Examples of some of these are provided in the chart below:

Managing Call Server and Signaling Protocol Issues with the nGeniusONE Platform

Problem area or UC&C complaint Possible cause (Security, Network, Server Performance, Interoperability)

“I can’t use my phone.” • Security – issues with access to services• Enablers – issue with DNS not configured correctly on endpoint or server• Network – performance issues

“I can’t dial out.” • Network – issues with endpoints communicating with the call server• Network – issue with call servers communicating with external peers• Session Border Controllers – interoperability issues between the call server and the SIP trunk

“It’s slow to dial out.” • Network – WAN issue at remote site causing slow response to call servers• Server – congested or badly balanced call servers• Server – vendor interoperability / code issues (e.g. SBCs)• Network – incorrect network prioritization for signaling protocols

“There’s no one at the other end of the call.”

• Call Server – issue affecting call transmission (a one-way call)• Network – diverse routing in the network with no return path

“That phone call was of poor quality." • Call Server – configuration issues negotiating wrong codec on call setup• Network – bandwidth or misconfigured QoS issues affecting call quality• Endpoint – bad microphone at remote end, echo cancellers not working

Table 1: UC&C Problems and possible root causes. Whose problem is it? - The Network, Server, and/or the UC&C Team?

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Figure 2: The nGeniusONE platform provides a common workflow for incident management and root cause escalation for unified communications and collaboration that includes call server signaling protocols that are similar to workflows for other services. The workflow leverages the Service Dashboard, Service Monitors, Dependency Mapping, Session Analysis and, when necessary, packet decode.

Rapid Diagnosis of Issues: nGeniusONE Platform with ASI Technology for Call Managers and Signaling ProtocolsASI technology provides unique metadata that includes Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Key Traffic Indicators (KTIs), Key Server Indicators (KSIs) and Key Error Indicators (KEIs), offering support for Call Control or ‘signaling’ protocols (SIP, H.323, and SCCP) as well as enabling Protocols and UC application servers making up the UC service.

The nGeniusONE platform with ASI technology provides contextual workflows that facilitate the quick diagnosis of issues with the Signaling environment. This way, operators can identify issues such as poorly performing Call Manager Servers, Session Border Controls, SIP Trunks, congested WAN links, misconfigured QoS / CoS classes or VLAN assignments, or problematic infrastructure network components.

Once an incident occurs, IT staff can make use of the nGeniusONE platform’s intuitive workflows between the real-time Service Dashboard, Service Monitors and Dependency Maps to triage and solve a given problem. Handoffs to other complementary component management tools (for servers or network components) or the ability to perform IP Traffic deep dive into Packet or Session Analysis are available as necessary (see Figure 2).

About Unified Communications and CollaborationUnified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) consists of a multitude of applications and services delivered over a shared or converged infrastructure leveraging Call Servers; Session Border Controllers (SBCs) and Gateways; business UC&C applications such as presence, messaging, collaboration and teleconferencing; and enabling services, such as DNS, LDAP and RADIUS (See Figure 1).

Figure 1: A sample UC&C environment – User Communities, SIP Trunks and PSTN Gateways, and Server infrastructure for Call Management, Presence, Conferencing, Enablers, etc. Areas of the network that will benefit from strategically deployed ASI performance management visibility are locations characterized by high traffic volume and critical conversations paths.

Common Dataset with

Cross-Indexed Metrics

Third Party Component

Performance Management

Tools

IM & PresenceServers

Call ManagerServers

VoiceMessaging

StorageDatabaseServers

ApplicationServers

Virtual DesktopServers

ConferencingServers

SIP TRUNKSWAN / LAN

Service EnablersService Enablers DNS

PSTN

Call Center, Campus, Branchand Remote Users

CloudConnectors

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Triaging a Call Connect Problem

When a group of callers in the Seattle office is experiencing trouble dialing out, the Service Dependency Map, helps IT staff discover which users are accessing which Call Servers providing quick identification and visibility of the efficiency or anomalies in the Call Manager cluster.

By leveraging ASI, the nGeniusONE platform discovers and maps all the layers within the UC environment to visualize the service flow viewed as a Service Dependency Map. The Service Dependency Map for SIP in Figure 3 reveals many errors. In fact, all requests between Seattle Users and Call Manager 02 are experiencing critical failures.

Further investigation is called for. Drilling down from the Service Dependency Map to the SIP Call Server Monitor puts actionable information in the operator’s hands (see Figure 4). A key differentiator for the nGeniusONE platform over other point tools is that once a problem is identified in the Server and Community Summary table at the top of the Call Manager Monitor screen, additional information is available in the graphs below for the server being investigated.

The Server and Community Summary table in Figure 4 is expanded in Figure 5 to show the full scope of the problem we are investigating. The issue between the Seattle users and the Call Manager 02 shows 2,536 Call Registration Requests failed during the last hour. Each screen in the nGeniusONE platform provides a great deal of information for further triaging. In this case, specific metrics, error details and analysis information for Call Manager 02 are all available within the same screen.

Real-World Use Case: How nGeniusONE Platform Workflows Triage Call Managers and Signaling Protocol IssuesThere is a common set of problems such as trouble connecting or “calls not going through” that always seem to cause user complaints with help desk personnel. Phone calls and video conferencing are more personal than other business communications and users expect immediate connection followed by a high quality experience during the call. Companies also expect immediate connection when a consumer wants to reach customer support. Any disruption will just irritate the consumer and impact customer loyalty and potential revenue. The following use case demonstrates how logical workflows in the nGeniusONE platform can be used to quickly triage and resolve such real-world scenarios.

Figure 4: Drill-down to the SIP Call Server Monitor offers deeper analysis into the communications between the Seattle Users and Call Manager 2.

Figure 3: nGeniusONE platform Service Dependency for SIP provides a map of all layers of the UC&C environment to visualize the service flow and interaction between Seattle Users, Call Managers, Gateways and Trunks.

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Gaining the Best Visibility for IT: ASI Instrumentation for Call Servers and Signaling ProtocolsEnterprises with existing nGenius® implementations may already have the right instrumentation in the best locations for leveraging ASI with the nGeniusONE platform to address UC&C service deployment issues. However, for those expanding an existing environment, the best visibility for IT organizations can be gained by adopting some combination of the following:

• Add InfiniStreamNG™ appliances, via TAPs or SPAN ports, for signaling (SIP, SCCP and H323), near the Call Servers to provide a vantage point to analyze the performance of a Call Server to a client or any other signaling device, or management domain, such as a Session Border Controller , Border Gateway, or SIP Trunk.

• nGenius Packet Flow Switches deployed in the data center will provide the ability to connect multiple links to existing InfiniStream appliances where appropriate to gain performance management visibility and share with other tools as necessary.

• Virtual Server farms and hybrid cloud deployments can be instrumented using vSCOUT™ to feed the InfiniStreamNG appliance or vSTREAM™ which will expose the broader ASI analysis capabilities to the application performance in the virtual environment.

Figure 6: nGeniusONE Platform Call Server Monitor showing Errors between Call Server 2 and Seattle Users. Call Server 02, which the users in Seattle are associated with, shows an error message “403: Forbidden.”

On the same page of the service monitor, a summary of the distribution of Errors over time provides an at-a-glance view of the health of the servers involved in delivering UC services. Focusing on Call Manager 02 uncovers specific errors that reveal the problem (see Figure 6).

The final step in this particular workflow is to investigate the Session Analysis for the specific Seattle Users experiencing the problem (see Figure 7). It confirms that the 403: Forbidden error, which means the server understands the requests but is refusing to fulfill them because the users are not authorized to register on this call manager. The next step to fix this issue is to reconfigure Call Manager 2 either by adding the users individually in the Call Manager or using ‘auto-registration’ so the problem will not occur in the future as new employees / phones are added in Seattle.

Figure 5: The Server and Community Summary in SIP Call Manager Monitor shows all the requests between Seattle Users and Call Manager 2 are failing.

© 2018 NETSCOUT SYSTEMS, INC. All rights reserved. NETSCOUT, the NETSCOUT logo, Guardians of the Connected World, Adaptive Service Intelligence, Arbor Networks, the Arbor Networks logo, ATLAS, Infi niStream, Infi niStreamNG, nGenius, and nGeniusONE are registered trademarks or trademarks of NETSCOUT SYSTEMS, INC., and/or its subsidiaries and/or affi liates in the USA and/or other countries.Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners.

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issues affecting the end-to-end UC&C Service, delivering actionable information often outside the reach of existing UC&C tools.

The service specific workflows within the nGeniusONE platform leverage technology to effectively break down the barriers between the various IT operations teams, quickly elevating issues to the right team responsible for the service degradations, and ultimately, enabling UC&C services to be returned to optimal performance as quickly as possible.

Collaborate More Effectively to Pinpoint and Resolve IssuesThe nGeniusONE platform provides a single, consistent set of workflows and views that IT, Server, Network and UC&C teams can use to triage service delivery problems experienced in their environment. Signaling protocols, such as SIP, SCCP, and H323 form a key part of the UC&C service for call setup and teardown, and are analyzed by ASI technology, provided by the InfiniStream appliance.

With the nGeniusONE platform, IT is able to manage UC&C holistically and collaborate more effectively to identify the root cause of

Figure 7: nGeniusONE platform Session Analysis provides additional evidence of the interaction between the Seattle Users, and the Call Manager 02 that confirms the Call Manager 02 registration problem.