VoIP Enterprises are widely deploying VoIP to save money and improve productivity. Assessing and managing VoIP presents different challenges than monitoring traditional data applications. Visual UpTime Select provides a complete solution for managing VoIP, from pre-deployment assessment to post-deployment optimization. Pre-deployment Consolidating voice and data creates new risks and increases the impact of network performance problems. Prior to deployment, enterprises must baseline the network to ensure there is adequate, high-quality bandwidth capacity for each site, with low latency and minimal packet loss. A proper baseline indicates how peaks in application traffic during the busiest hours affects VoIP traffic on the same network. Administrators need a detailed report on the compatibility of each site for VoIP deployment, how many calls can be supported during peak periods and specific problems that hamper VoIP performance. Performance Management Once VoIP is deployed, monitoring call performance and quality is critical to preventing outages and optimizing user satisfaction. End-users have grown accustomed to the 5-nines of reliability provided by traditional telephony. Enterprise IT staffs must be able to rapidly detect and troubleshoot VoIP performance problems. Network visibility and monitoring tools alert IT managers to current or impending performance problems and enable them to manage proactively by changing configurations or adding capacity. Proper VoIP monitoring includes a combination of metrics for general network performance and specific voice end-user quality of experience. Detailed bandwidth consumption and traffic composition information is critical to detect and prevent VoIP and application traffic from interference. Network SLA measurements such as availability, jitter and latency are essential to detect underlying network performance problems that impact VoIP performance. IT administrators need a system that provides the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) at both the per-call level and as a site-to-site aggregate. Without per-call MOS, jitter and latency are simply rough quality indicators, neglecting codec loss and samples per packet. Without per-call quality metrics, administrators cannot determine if upgrading equipment or bandwidth improves the end-user experience. Administrators need per-call MOS metrics to evaluate if upgraded switches, routers and network services are show a satisfactory Return on Investment (ROI).  Select VoIP  Select VoIP enables enterprises to assess VoIP readiness and optimize VoIP performance Performance Metrics    VoIP Planner Determine VoIP readiness and manage ongoing deployments with active call testing   Ongoing Administration Once administrators detect a decrease in VoIP performance, they investigate network performance at a granular level. VoIP impairment can be caused by problems at application, PBX, local loop, port, end-to-end circuit or service level parameter. VoIP management tools must quickly pinpoint where the call quality is being degraded to enable quick isolation and resolution and minimize adverse impacts on the enterprise. VoIP deployments typically cause major headaches for enterprises accustomed to hub-and-spoke networks. Users at remote sites can communicate directly with one another and no information flows through the headquarters location. Centralized solutions fail in performance management because they only provide head-end visibility. For service level parameters such as latency and jitter, a complete site-to-site measurement will help isolate poor performance from your service provider or within your network. Future Rollout Support Continual optimization of deployed VoIP networks is essential for success. As user application traffic increases or changes in pattern, and new sites come online, administrators must tweak the network to maintain the same level of performance. VoIP management tools must provide monitoring and reporting on network changes to identify sites with degraded performance, changes in call volume distribution and new sites and applications. With this visibility into both network performance and end-user quality of experience, administrators can maintain high-quality VoIP performance by shaping traffic, changing queuing options, adjusting call gateway settings and provisioning more bandwidth.