managing voip as a business service -...

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Managing VoIP as a Business Service

© 2005 TechTarget

BIO


By Chris Crowell

Chris Crowell—As Chief Technology Officer for Aprisma Management Technologies Inc., Mr. Crowell has 20 years of experience leading software development teams. He has worked with Aprisma’s SPECTRUM suite for over 10 years. Under his leadership, SPECTRUM has consistently increased product revenue and market share, earning a multitude of technical awards.

This IT Briefing is based on an Aprisma/TechTarget Webcast, “Managing VoIP as a Business Service.” To view this webcast online, please click the link.

This TechTarget IT Briefing covers the following topics:• Business Service Management Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

• What leading analyst firms are saying . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1• Aprisma Business Service Intelligence (BSI) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3• Managing VoIP: A Case Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3• Why Partner with Aprisma? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Copyright ©2005. Aprisma Management Technologies Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction, adaptation, or translation without prior written permission is prohibited, except as allowed under the copyright laws.

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1 IT Briefing:Managing VoIP as a Business Service Sponsored By:


Business ServiceManagement OverviewWhat leading analyst firms are sayingFigure 1 illustrates Gartner Inc.’s IT Management Process Maturity Model. The model comprisesGartner’s five levels of IT operational maturity. Under the Gartner model, maturity is measured as a factor of effectiveness, but more importantly it is a factor of how well IT is aligned with business initiatives.Gartner maps operational maturity into five levels. At level zero, IT operations are struggling to add value to the business, with chaotic management in place. At level one, IT has some level of control over inven-tory and it is capable of basic fault management, but it is still in reactive mode. At level two, IT has moved on to having the ability to manage performance and

performance trends. At this level, IT does more advanced fault management, which may include root cause analysis, and it can proactively set thresholds. At level three, IT has moved up to managing more than just the components of the infrastructure and is managing from a service perspective, by providing real-time and historical services availability analysis. Some organizations at this level also maintain and manage the service level agreement. At level four, the ultimate, IT has realized alignment with the business. According to Gartner, most organizations are at level one or level two. Many are striving for level three. Very few have level four in sight. Gartner has discovered organizations cannot skip levels. They have to progress one level at a time.

Organizations that are at level one or level two on Gartner’s model typically have traditional “silo” IT

Figure 1


management in which network management, storage management and system management, for example, each occur within their own “silos” rather than being integrated. Roughly five years ago, large companies undertook ambitious IT projects with long timelines and high costs. There, the objective was often the right one but the benefit was rarely realized. IT responded by deploying point products from many different vendors to fill specific needs. At many com-panies there are separate groups and separate lines of management reporting up through the CIO. This phenomenon is often called siloed management.

Gartner breaks traditional silo IT management into five major silos: network, storage, system, application and database (see Figure 2). In many companies, the silo management approach resulted in little or no process integration of either groups or tools. The main problem with silo management is that business services expand to silos. For example, a single appli-cation can be dependent on a set of servers, thenetwork and storage systems. The successful opera-tion of an application is dependent on all the areas operating at satisfactory levels, not just one area. The dependencies between the infrastructure and the business services need to be mapped to determine

the end-to-end business service health. In other words, to manage a business service you need to map the service to the technologies that support the service. This mapping is the glue that aligns IT to the business, and businesses need both the tools and the organizational structure to facilitate that service ori-entation. Gartner calls the mapping between IT and business services the IT service dependency map. At Aprisma, we refer to this concept as Technology Relationship Mapping.

Meta Group Inc. has a concept that is similar toGartner’s IT Management Process Maturity model. Meta depicts this as a pyramid showing the path companies must follow to move from being reactive to proactive or adaptive (see Figure 3). Meta found most organizations to be either at the reactive or managed level, working toward being proactive. In Meta’s view, at the peak of the pyramid, strategic initiatives and the associated IT changes are easily absorbed with minimal disruption to the business services. Meta has also found few companies are ready to move to that adaptive level, for a variety of reasons including not just technological obstacles but also organizational barriers.

Figure 2


Both Meta and Gartner agree the industry is moving toward requiring IT-business alignment for future successes. As part of a study conducted in April 2004, Meta asked over 300 senior IT executives to list the key enablers to moving up its Organizational Maturity pyramid from reactive to adaptive. Meta analysts found that the network infrastructure and its management were essential elements and that the initial concern in the area of investments would be with the network. The key takeaway message from that study was that the successful operation of the network was the most important step in becoming an adaptive enterprise.

Aprisma Business Service Intelligence (BSI)Whether one uses Gartner or Meta terminology, the overall trend of moving toward IT-business alignment is called Business Service Management. Business Service Assurance falls under the umbrella of Business Service Management. Aprisma’s methodol-ogy for Business Service Assurance is called Business Service Intelligence (BSI). BSI is based on under-standing the relationships and the impact of IT

infrastructure on those business services—in other words, understanding the interdependencies that exist between the technologies and how those tech-nologies relate back to the business services.

BSI takes a proactive approach in capturing depen-dencies, keeping up with dependency changes and providing operational performance information in business level terms. BSI also crosses technology and vendor silos within IT organizations to facilitate the management effort. BSI is powered by intelligent analysis capabilities. That intelligence is based on sophisticated correlation capabilities that include model-based, rule-based and policy-based analytics. The next section contains a case study concerning the deployment of VoIP and its management as an example of BSI in action.

Managing VoIP: A Case StudyVoIP is a major initiative for most organizations. Most organizations have either already deployed VoIP or plan to deploy it. Enterprises view VoIP as a vehicle to controlling capital cost, to reducing operational cost, to fully utilizing the existing data infrastructure, and to introducing applications that will help improve

Figure 3


employee productivity. Even with all that potential, there is some caution with VoIP. It is new technology for many companies. The telephone is businesscritical. The difference with VoIP and many past ITinitiatives is that companies are looking for a means to ensure a successful deployment and, once deployed, they want to ensure its continuous suc-cessful operation.

VoIP is a business service that is delivered over an integrated set of applications, transport technologies, systems and networking hardware. SPECTRUM®, Aprisma’s product suite, provides tools that allow the user to follow a methodology for first assessing,second instrumenting, and third operationally main-taining any key business service. Figure 4 lists key questions that must be answered. In order for the new service to be successful, an organization needs to answer each of these questions in the affirmative.

Figure 5 shows a simplified network infrastructure for our VoIP case study company with the main office in New York and a remote office in Los Angeles. SPECTRUM is already being used to discover and map the network topology, and it is being used to manage the network. In this example we are connect-

ing the two offices via dual T-1 lines. In the New York office is the data center and the connection to the Internet. For this enterprise, the objective is to imple-ment VoIP. But before the initiative can begin, there needs to be analysis and assessment to understand if the current infrastructure can support a successful VoIP deployment. The assessment will include inves-tigation into capacity, performance and asset avail-ability—among other things. The first metric we are going to examine is the historical availability of the current infrastructure. The new VoIP infrastructure can and will only be deployed in a stable, highly avail-able environment.

SPECTRUM provides the proactive fault management solution to monitor for availability outages, analyze for root causes and record outage information. If any devices show a pattern of availability problems and maintenance or replacement would be required, these capital or configuration changes need to occur before the new VoIP service is deployed. SPECTRUM device availability reports can show summary avail-ability data, as well as detailed availability data in case there is a problem. If availability seemed to be a problem at a high level, we could drill into a detailed report that analyzes the root causes and the

Figure 4


symptomatic events. In this particular example, the infrastructure is stable and we can proceed with the deployment.

Another important consideration is whether or not the infrastructure has the performance to support voice traffic. Voice traffic is unique in that packet delays will cause problems in the quality of the voice signals to the listener. Delays between packets result in broken words much like you might experience on a cell phone with poor signal strength. It is important to measure key VoIP performance metrics such asjitter, packet loss and latency as a step in understand-ing the network’s ability to support VoIP. Jitter, packet loss and latency tests can be set up and measured between the two main points in the network usingSPECTRUM.

Figure 6 shows the path of a jitter test that can be initiated using the SPECTRUM Service Performance Manager. This test will help us measure the ability to deliver a series of packets and measure the latency between them. The SPECTRUM Service Performance Manager application is designed to work with deployed agents and devices that support response-

time measurement tests. Many hardware vendors have built response-time measurement test capabili-ties directly into the routers or switches and these tests can be configured remotely.

Unfortunately, most vendors provide an interfacebut it is awkward to use, insufficient and often propri-etary. If multiple devices from multiple vendors or agents are deployed, you must have a uniqueinterface for each one of them. By contrast, theSPECTRUM Service Performance Manager repre-sents a common interface that greatly reduces the complexity of first determining what tests are sup-ported, and also it greatly reduces the administrative burden of configuring those tests.

The Service Performance Manager will automatically discover what devices and agents support response-time measurement tests, and also discover on aper-agent basis what tests can be initiated. In this example we are looking for response-time measure-ment agents that support the jitter test. Once we have located an appropriate agent, we would use the application to configure a recurring test measuring general latency over the desired path shown in Figure 7.

Figure 5


Figure 6

Figure 7


SPECTRUM can also be configured to log response-time test data. We can use that as input to produce a trend graph that will provide insight into the opera-tional performance of the infrastructure over a period of time. With those graphs we can make more informed decisions. These trends also provide a baseline for later comparison after making necessary infrastructure changes to deploy VoIP. In this case we are directing the result of the aforementioned jitter test to the day log, and we are going to graph the trend over a three-month period (see Figure 8). This graph shows the jitter latency response-time test flat, and current latency versus a three-month trend. The blue line in the graph is the trend and the red is the current weekly data.

The ITU standards organization recommends that jit-ter latency be under 150 milliseconds in order to have a quality voice signal. In Figure 8 the latency trend falls far below the 150 millisecond recommendation, which allows us to continue with the assessment.

Another performance metric we may look at is WAN utilization. The voice traffic will increase the load on the wide area lines. When voice is deployed, a typical

way to ensure quality voice delivery is to make the voice traffic the highest priority. So we saturate the WAN link. As a result of adding additional traffic, the voice may or may not be affected but any of the applications running over that link could be.

In this example we are connecting the remote sales office in Los Angeles. At times the voice communica-tion is business critical, so we need to ensure the proper capacity. Figure 9 depicts the bandwidth utili-zation and plots the current WAN utilization versus a three-month trend line. Again the blue line shows the trend and the red line shows the current weekly data. Note the trend is less than 40% utilization on the trunk T-1. Even in a fail-over state we are below satu-ration (100% utilization), and we should have only a minor performance degradation in case of a failure. Though there is no current objection with the rollout, this area could cause concern down the road. We may have to revisit this.

With the roll out of VoIP, we will be adding all sorts of equipment that requires port connectivity. The new equipment includes call managers, call gateways and many IP phones. One important consideration in the

Figure 8


Figure 9

assessment phase is to understand if there is any new capital requirement. A prominent problem in today’s enterprises is understanding utilization of assets and reclaiming unused assets. That is espe-cially true at the port level. Even if the enterprise is fortunate enough to know which device assets are in use or are idle, rarely do enterprises know the utiliza-tion all the way down to the port level.

By running a report to identify the available ports in the infrastructure, a decision can be made to either reclaim and reuse the existing ports or buy new equipment. In Figure 10 we want to run a report that displays port availability. It not only shows the ports that are administratively dormant, but also intelli-gently determines which ports are operationally dormant. Even if a port has a wire attached, it doesn’t mean that it is in active use. With this report, we analyze the traffic patterns over a period of time. This report can be scoped to include all the ports in the entire network or its subsets. Here, we run it against all the ports in all the equipment. You have the option to run it by vendor, by product type or any user-defined arbitrary group. The report also identifies the name, type and speed of the port, making it very easy

to determine if the port is in fact usable for the VoIP service.

It may also be necessary to determine the current firmware versions, the key devices in the infrastruc-ture. Older versions of firmware may or may not be compatible with the requirements of voice traffic. In many cases, older versions of firmware are not com-patible with voice traffic. So if the firmware version is below the required level, an assessment must be done to determine if a firmware version upgrade must be scheduled or if it is necessary to purchase new equipment because the firmware is not capable of supporting the voice traffic.

With this SPECTRUM report (see Figure 11), you can run it against the entire infrastructure but the reports can also be scoped to include only a subset of devices—by vendor, product type or any user-defined arbitrary group. This report can also be run to search for only versions of firmware that are known not to support the new applications. By doing that, you get a short list of devices that will absolutely require an upgrade or replacement. That allows the operations or engineering teams to focus on the necessary upgrade plans. If a firmware upgrade is required,


Figure 10

Figure 11


Figure 12

SPECTRUM’s configuration management capabilities can be used to initiate those firmware upgrades.

Beyond those base sets of tests, we also want tomeasure and monitor key metrics specific to VoIP. Quality of Service (QoS) is important to voice traffic. SPECTRUM provides the ability to discover QoS poli-cies in traffic classes configured throughout the network (see Figure 12). Depending on the imple-mentation, VoIP may or may not be provisioned with more than one policy, but it is deployed with multiple policies so that for each policy we can monitor detailed statistics on the operations specific to the policy. The IT operations team must understand the QoS policy to ensure the smooth and effective perfor-mance of IT-based applications like voice.

After completion of the assessment analysis, we are ready to move ahead with deployment (see Figure 13). The VoIP infrastructure includes but is not limited to IP phones connected to all the edge switches, redun-dant call managers to the data center switches, and call gateways to the phone network. With the addition of new infrastructure components, we want to expand the set of response-time tests we had set up

during the assessment phase. With VoIP, the call managers now become a critical piece of the infra-structure. If there is trouble or a delay in connecting to the call managers, that will affect the ability to make calls. The SPECTRUM Service Performance Manager is used to execute connection tests to these critical applications.

For our implementation, DHCP and DNS services are also critical to the VoIP service and any performance associated with those applications will affect call setup. So, in addition to the existing jitter packet loss and latency testing, new DNS and DHCP response-time tests can be created using the SPECTRUMService Performance Manager. These test the ability for a request to be initiated through DNS and DHCP servers and their ability to respond to lookup or an address request in a timely fashion. We also need to update the previously configured jitter test to include testing of a path to the newly deployed call gateway, as well as to any edge switches providing connectivity through the IP phones. These tests will enable both proactive, real-time notification of degradation of per-formance, as well as provide historical data for future trend comparisons.


The SPECTRUM system and application monitoring agent can be installed to monitor the prospective operations of the data center servers as well the applications running on those servers. TheSPECTRUM iAgent also provides the capability for outbound response-time testing from the data center servers to initiate other response-time tests. Finally, we can set up thresholds and track call statistics as provided by the call managers. In this case, we are tracking the average number of calls per second and capturing that information for graphing purposes. With these graphs, we can understand and trend the call volume (see Figure 14).

After implementing the VoIP infrastructure and instrumenting it, acceptance testing can be per-formed to see how the new environment is perform-ing. This testing will include comparing the new baselines to the pre-VoIP deployed baselines. The first step is to compare the all-important jitter results of the newly deployed VoIP infrastructure to those of the pre-VoIP infrastructure.

In Figure 15, the grey lines represent the peaks of the before-VoIP baseline. The added VoIP service has increased jitter latency by approximately 30 milli-

seconds. At this point, we need to determine if that is acceptable jitter for the VoIP service. Recalling that 150 milliseconds is the maximum recommended threshold, we see that we are still below that level. Even with the new service deployed, we have proper performance criteria.

Next, we will compare WAN bandwidth utilization to the pre-VoIP baseline. In Figure 16, the grey line shows the peaks of the previous trend. We can see here the new peaks are above 50% utilization. In that case, if we had a failure of one of the T-1s at peak time, that would definitely impact performance. We would have a saturated WAN link and that would cause us to lose data. We would have to resend data packets and any disruption in packet delivery will cause an impact on the quality of the voice signal itself.

With the VoIP service fully deployed, we have created all the test points we need to prepare for the day-today management. Of course we will need to be able to manage the components in the key performance metrics that we just set up, but we want to do this in terms of the service. The definition of that service is provided through all those monitoring points used

Figure 13


Figure 14

Figure 15


Figure 16

during the instrumentation phase, including availabil-ity, response time and performance. We map therelationships between the components, the inter-mediate services like DNS and DHCP, and the VoIPservice back to the customers or the businessowners. We make that observable through themanagement interface. The SPECTRUM service dashboard provides a service perspective to senior management business owners and/or customers. These high-level consumers need a different perspec-tive than the operational team. All stakeholders need to understand service dependencies and impact, but from different perspectives. The service dashboard provides an at-a-glance interface for seeing the ser-vices, the relationships to other services, and the current condition.

Now that we have created an operational solution to manage the deployed service, let us look at it at afailure scenario. The failure scenario involves the loss of one of the redundant T-1 links, creating a partial WAN failure. We see an indication of this in the SPECTRUM dashboard. In Figure 17 the SPECTRUM dashboard shows a WAN-linked degradation that has impacted all services at the remote office. For senior management, it is essential to see the customer

impact to understand the priority of the problem. This is shown here. Because of the WAN link failure, both the finance department, and the remote sales office are highly impacted while the engineering group has felt critical impact.

If it were budget time, there would be critical impact on the finance department, or at the end of a quarter there would be critical impact on the sales depart-ment. You could configure different times when it had different levels of impact at different organiza-tions. By clicking on the current outage tab in the dashboard, you can see that a degraded WAN link is impacting all the services at the remote office. In his view, the dashboard shows the business manager that a troubleshooter has been assigned and is expected to fix the problem by 3PM. This knowledge arms senior management and the business owners with information to prevent them from making phone calls for status that take away from time spent fixing the problems.

From an operations point of view, the operators who are monitoring the infrastructure (including the services) see a single alarm versus many alarms in the operational console. SPECTRUM has done a


Figure 17

Figure 18


correlation that shows which services are impacted and the symptoms (see Figure 18). The operator can easily focus on the root cause of the problem to get the services back up and running, rather than wasting time looking at or working on symptomatic events that are not the root cause of the problem.

For services like VoIP, the determination of theavailability is about the quality of service from theperspective of the user experience. If the QoS is not at an acceptable level, there will be reliability prob-lems or performance problems. A more thorough analysis needs to be conducted to drill down into the root cause of any outages, and we need to determine ways to improve the service to reach those acceptable levels.

Why Partner with Aprisma?Aprisma Management Technologies’ SPECTRUM software manages the health and the performance of networks and the business services that rely on them. We are fortunate to have over 1,000 customers in 40 countries. Aprisma's intellectual property portfolio is very broad, having resulted from an R&D investment of nearly $500 million over the last 15 years. We promise all of our clients that we will deliver our solu-tion on time and on budget. That means that within about 30 days, you will be up and running with the software. In approximately 90 days, you will see tan-gible, measurable impact both operationally and from a financial perspective. Our return on invest-ment has been documented independently. Whether our customers are in financial services, manufactur-

ing, retail, entertainment, service providers or the federal government space, SPECTRUM has been able to reduce the time to find and fix problems while also verifying and validating service quality.

Breaking down the functionality of SPECTRUMsoftware, it is designed to help you manage what matters. At a time when CIOs are looking to reduce the number of vendors they need to work with, we can help reduce the number of tools required to accomplish management and operations tasks. We automatically discover and understand the relation-ships between IT infrastructure elements, theservices they support, and the customers they serve. Aprisma is unique in that we can proactively predict problems rather than report on a problem after it has already happened. When things do go wrong, we pin-point the cause of those problems and provide you with an understanding of customers and services that are affected by the issue. If you are accelerating the service restoration, we provide you with action-able advice on how to fix the problem and we help you put in place new thresholds and monitoring points to predict or prevent the problem from hap-pening again in the future.

We invite all prospective customers to come visit the Aprisma offices in New Hampshire. We are a differ-ent company in that we believe there is nothing more important than our customers. Our objective and goal is to provide you with the information you need to do your job better and spend less time doing it. This is a partnership, and it is our commitment that we will earn the right to your business every day.


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