The old way: VoIP strains network management capabilities.

VoIP is one of the most demanding new consumers of network resources. Call quality can be affected by the slightest network hiccups that escape the notice of network monitoring that rely on periodic sampling and testing. Actual call data is usually ignored from a monitoring perspective. Detecting, diagnosing and reporting on call quality issues is extraordinarily complicated, with information about individual calls scattered across different events in call manager logs, endpoint logs and call detail records. Packet level information and network device logs are often needed as well to identify flaky network segments, WAN problems and the like. Each one of these data sources is usually available through a separate console, with no end-to-end reporting facility. If you have applications integrated with VoIP such as Web based calling and access to web services you even have to look at stack traces and messages from your web and application servers to find and fix problems.

The new way: Follow VoIP problems from apps to network gear.

Splunk indexes data from every component involved in delivery of VoIP services and applications. Powerful transaction search capabilities let you find and report across all events from all sources that relate to a single call. You can easily set up alerts when individual calls exceed quality thresholds so you proactively identify problems rather than waiting for users to complain. Splunk even lets you navigate between network activity, VoIP call managers and web application data to diagnose complex VoIP application problems.