To set the stage, my company is a call center which has a Cisco infrastructure with an Avaya phone system. I have been building our monitoring solution with Orion, which is going great for the network side of things. We were about to setup the Avaya Converged Network Analyzer (CNA) to monitor the VOIP side of things, especially our remote user population that is approximately 150 users. It came with the recent phone switch upgrade but it looks like Avaya just completely dropped the product, this month. The remote users connect with a VPN client and use a software phone to take calls. I need to be able to monitor my remote user connections. Anything would help at this point, whether it’s just ping times, memory/cpu, or full blown VOIP statistics.
My understanding of CNA, is that it would talk to the phone switch to get information like registered phones, thier extensions, and ip address. It would then use that information to monitor all the phones around the company. Group the phones by location and you could easily see issues with the network or phone system and where the fault is. Whether it be a WAN link to another site or a flakey remote user ISP.
So, I got to thinking. The Orion VOIP module would pretty much cover the internal LAN/WAN using the routers and switches, which works, but how am I going to monitor the remote user population? The new network discovery feature could be useful to scan and add nodes, one time. Every time a user connects, they could get a different IP. I would also need to setup SNMP on all the remote computers, which would not be a problem.
Is there any way to make adding and removing nodes a little more dynamic? I see how I could use some of the functionality of Orion to get close to what I am looking for but it would probably require some coding. I don't mind SQL but I am lost on everything else, as far as coding.
Does anyone else face these same issues? Did I explain myself thoroughly? Is Orion capable of that kind of functionality, with a little bit of work? Are there any other tools that can do that? I would like to hear your thoughts.
Thanks, Ben.
