In this blog, I will discuss about our NetFlow and VOIP add-ons for OpManager and how they help in isolating VOIP degradation due to bandwidth consumption and QoS configuration issues. If you are new to OpManager, please visit this link for more information. VOIP add-on relies on Cisco IPSLA to collect QoS metrics. The Cisco IOS IP Service Level Agreements(SLAs) is a Cisco technology use active monitoring to generate traffic in a continuous, reliable, and predictable manner, thus enabling the measurement of network performance and health. Please visit this link to know more on Cisco IP SLA.

As discussed in previous blog, we rely extensively on performance data like packet loss, delay, jitter and the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) to define QoS policies. Now OpManager with Netflow and VOIP add-on gives you a single comprehensive console to correlate all these parameters and helps reduce voice quality issues instantaneously.

VOIP and NetFlow dashboard

OpManager add-on family includes NetFlow and VOIP add-ons for increased visibility into network performance data. VOIP dashboard displays all performance centric information like packet loss, delay, jitter and the Mean Opinion Score (MOS). Network administrators identifies the problematic sites based on the MOS. MOS is a function of codec used for voice communication, jitter, packet loss and delay. Sites having the poorest MOS scores are hit with high jitter and packet loss. The following is the general MOS rating scheme for voice traffic.

The following use cases helps us to understand the functionality of both the add-ons.

1. Poor voice quality due to incorrect configuration of backup process:



Following is a screenshot of a VOIP dashboard on OpManager. Here we can see a bad call with high jitter and latency.

MOS for a voice call with Jitter, Packet Loss, and delay.

Now the administrator can see into the bandwidth usage pattern of the particular link which connects to the remote site in the same page. Using the detailed bandwidth reports like top applications and conversations, generated using NetFlow add-on, network administrator can quickly identify the root cause of the VOIP degradation. In the screenshot, we can see there is a backup process occupying most of the bandwidth during the period when performance degradation happened.

Voice degradation due to backup process

Based on the observations the backup process is rescheduled for non-business hours and this helps increase the voice quality during business hours.

2. Using NetFlow add-on - CBQoS reports to identify traffic drops:

Another angle to investigate this VOIP degradation is examining the QoS policies defined at the router level. Here we can use the CBQoS reporting ability in NetFlow add-on, to find drops in voice traffic due to insufficient bandwidth allocation or lack of priority routing to the voice class.

In the following screenshot, CBQoS graph gives you the pre and post policy metrics including the drop percentage for each class. Using this information, the administrator finds traffic drop in VOIP class and so can raise the VOIP priority to route the voice traffic in best effort.

Drop in voice traffic - CBQoS report

Hope this helps you understand the functional advantages in using VOIP and NetFlow add-ons with OpManager. Please write to us if you have any questions. Our support email id is netflowanalyzer-support@manageengine.com

Thanks

Raj

We have discussed about application detection and grouping in our previous blog . Now it is time to implement QoS policies based on the results. To provide preferential service to a specific type of traffic, it is necessary to define a class based QoS policy to raise the priority of the traffic. Here the class refers to different traffic classes or types identified in the discovery phase.

Fundamentally, QoS helps to reduce the delay and jitter for sensitive applications like VOIP or video by raising the priority of a flow or limiting the priority of another flow. Before deploying QoS policies it is important to know the threshold settings of max packet loss and max delay for those traffic classes like VOIP. This helps us to allocate more bandwidth and increase the priority for delay sensitive applications. Here are the max delay and jitter specification for voice, video and data traffic recommended by Cisco.

Now let us dive deeper into QoS configuration. It has four steps

1. Creating a traffic class or class-map

2. Creating a policy or policy-map

3. Associate a traffic class to a policy

4. Attaching the policy to an Interface

1.Creating a traffic class or class-map:

Traffic class helps to identify and name a specific traffic flow (or class) from all other traffic using different matching criterion. A traffic class is determined using a match criterion like port, protocol, IP address or an access group in ACL. Using the "class map" command one can define the traffic class with the desired criterion used to match against a specific traffic flow to further classify it.

2.Creating a policy or policy-map:

Policies help us in priority routing and queuing of the packet. This is achieved by a variety of means like - providing dedicated bandwidth, limiting bandwidth, creating queues with different routing characteristics, dropping the packets etc. A policy can be defined using the “policy map" command. Each policy specifies the action to take for packets that are in or out of profile.

3.Associate a traffic class to a policy:

Once the policy actions are defined, these actions can be associated with the desired traffic class. This helps to apply the specific policies to the traffic classes. A policy can be associated with one or more traffic classes.

4.Attaching the policy to an Interface:

Once all the class maps are associated with the defined policies, policy maps are associated with the interfaces. Here it is possible to specify the direction in which the traffic policy should be applied (either on packets coming into the interface or packets leaving the interface).

The following is an example CBQoS policy to raise the priority of voice traffic.

class-map match-all VOICE

match access-group name VOIP

ip access-list extended VOIP

permit udp any any range 16384 32767 precedence critical

permit tcp any eq 1720 any

permit tcp any any eq 1720

policy-map VOICEFAST

description Policy 6 M to MPLS

class VOICE

priority 600 64000

set ip precedence 5

The above policy provides priority with dedicated bandwidth to voice traffic with the hosts specified in the ACL list. Also sets the IP precedence bit to 5 which is critical application specification. Also click here to find how to block skype in your network using NBAR based application detection and CBQOS

And next is going to be an add-on post in this series which is very useful for VOIP deployments. I am going to talk about the NetFlow and VOIP add-ons for our OPManager in the next blog and how these add-ons are going to be helpful in QoS policies.

Thanks

Raj