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Product Reviews
 April 2002


Voxis Dashboard

Adir VoIP Technologies
520 Broad Street
Newark, NJ 07102
Ph: 973-412-3550
Web site: www.adirtech.com

Price: Starts at $115,000 and is based on port capacity for larger networks.

Editor's Choice Award

RATINGS (0-5)
Installation: 5
Documentation: 4.75
Features: 4.75
GUI: 4.5
Usability: 4.5
Overall: A


If you are tasked with managing and performing real-time monitoring of hundreds of VoIP gateways scattered across the world, you might just be facing a nightmare, to say the least. Fortunately, a company called Adir VoIP Technologies has a software suite called Voxis to aid Internet Telephony Service Providers (ITSPs) in this daunting task. The Voxis suite consists of four components:

  1. Voxis Miner � Provides intelligent data reduction, analysis, alarming, and reporting that supports service level agreement (SLA) management, network troubleshooting, and fraud detection.
  2. Voxis Dialer � End-to-end PSTN testing and analysis that captures the caller�s network experience.
  3. Voxis Streamer � IP �mesh testing� for a comprehensive, real-time view of network health for VoIP.
  4. Voxis Dashboard � The real-time data collection of all call activity on an entire VoIP network.

We focused our testing on Voxis Dashboard, since the other three applications do not work remotely through a proxy server, which is how we were connecting to the ITSP network. Voxis Dashboard is a client-server software application used to monitor and manage voice over IP (VoIP) traffic in real time. As call traffic originates from the public switched telephone network (PSTN), travels through the IP network, and terminates back onto the PSTN, performance, statistics, and alarm information is monitored at checkpoints along the way. Obviously, call traffic originating or terminating through another carrier�s network is tracked for that portion of the call flow that is carried within Voxis� domain. The Voxis server application resides either on a single UNIX Sun server or on redundant UNIX Sun servers. It monitors all call traffic passing through provisioned gateways. We should point out that the advantage of Voxis Dashboard is that it uses a lightweight, fault-tolerant message transport system similar to XML that uses a fraction of the resources used by SNMP.

In any event, we tested the Voxis Dashboard software application extensively and were pleased with the results. From the main GUI, you can launch the Alarms, Spans, Calls, Hosts, and other various screens. We first tested the Hosts screen, which features a color-coded square to quickly scan for the status. You can check a box next to the gateway host and then view the active processes. In addition, Dashboard provides you with the ability to get details on the gateways within your system, including gateway make, model, and IP address. You can monitor host processes that carry calls from entry into the IP network through the call termination point. Besides monitoring processes, you can also start, stop, or bounce (restart) processes. Other interesting features include a ping and trace route feature, as well enabling alarms to be sent to third-party software through a probe or via SNMP traps.

TROUBLESHOOTING/MAINTENANCE
Using the �quiesce� feature you can put an individual T1/E1 span out of service, for maintenance, troubleshooting, or repair. Quiescing a span places a span temporarily out of service without interference from calls or without affecting service. As existing calls siphon off the span, the channels are �busied out� so that no new calls arrive on the channels. Once the channels are clear, maintenance can begin. You can also toggle a gateway server from �production mode� to �maintenance mode,� which will allow you to upgrade or add new hardware to the server. In addition, from the user interface you can reboot the gateway simply by clicking on the gateway name from the Hosts screen and then clicking the Reboot button.

VIEWING ALARMS
Next, we examined the Alarms screen, which also features color-coded squares indicating the severity of the alarm � blue being the lowest, and red being the highest. A running tally at the bottom of the screen by alarm severity was a useful feature. From this screen you can simply highlight one or more alarms and remove or acknowledge them. Overall, the Alarms screen was pretty straightforward and easy to use.

MONITORING SPANS AND CALLS
The most interesting screen within Voxis is the �Spans� screen, which shows the span groups (usually named by country, but not necessarily) and allows you to select a span group to view the individual gateways, T1/E1 trunks, as well as down to the individual channels. According to Adir, in most situations, operations support personnel are individually assigned specific gateways or spans that they must monitor and troubleshoot. Thus, Voxis provides the ability to present a customized list of spans so that you need not view a multitude of spans assigned to other users. From the Spans screen you can view the Group name (e.g., Carrier Kuwait) and the number of T1/E1 channels in use and the number of channels available. Simply by selecting the check box next to the Group name we could view the details of the individual T1/E1 spans. To drill down even further for more details, we were able to check off the individual gateways to view call details in real-time. In addition one can view individual account details and account balances.

Within the Spans screen the spans are color-coded for quick visual inspection. Red indicates the span is inactive and not capable of taking calls, green indicates the span is active and available for calls, and yellow indicates the span is active but is not taking any new calls because it was placed out of service. Further, you can view individual channel status by color whereby gray represents that the channel is available (no calls are in progress), purple indicates the caller is in a dial/menu mode, and green indicates a call is in progress. Further, a teal color indicates that a fax call is in progress. Also, we should mention that the service provider could terminate any active call at will.

ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT
We noticed that we could not double-click on gateways within the Spans screen and then bring up the gateway properties in order to reboot the server or toggle the status from Maintenance to Production mode. This would be a nice feature to add. Also, if Adir developed its own billing software package and integrated it into the Voxis product suite, this might help round out this solution.

According to Adir, key features that they will be adding to their next release include support for DS3/E3 spans, including monitoring gateways in the Cisco ThunderVoice architecture, additional alarm messages, enhanced redundancy, and additional call states and QoS information

CONCLUSION
Voxis Dashboard supports several popular gateways, including Nuera, Cisco, and Net2Phone gateways. Voxis Dashboard is an easy-to-use, yet powerful quality monitoring and performance management tool that service providers will find indispensable. TMC Labs was impressed with how easy and powerful the Voxis Dashboard was and we wouldn�t hesitate to recommend this product to service providers or ITSPs looking to ensure service quality and reduce operational costs.

[ Return To The April 2002 Table Of Contents ]



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