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Great call out there jwilson2013 there is definitely a good amount of leg work to be done just gathering information about the existing phone system! After all we have to know what we are trying upgrade, ensuring the upgrade is a step forward and not a step backward in functionality! Having reliable feet on the ground to…

As long as voice quality is maintained, and the bandwidth is sufficient for the rest traffic sometimes that is all you need.

Aha yes! That can be a very easily overlooked topic! Especially if the implementer's get stuck on the idea of: "We will just put match up every desktop with an IP Phone" Having to know where each and every phone that needs to be replaced just shows how much detail needs to go into these types of deployments. Thanks mullinj

Agreed, currently I am creating individual reports for subnets I need to review collectively quickly. Which in the long run is a good but for on the fly checks this functionality would be very useful

Very true, Layer 8 (and above) have much more power and can be much more difficult to deal with than layers 1-7. Especially since they have the power to stop the project before it even it starts! Having monitoring in place before the roll out, I don't think you can stress that enough, being able to properly monitor and…

Definitely agree with zackm when I first started with IP SLA a few years ago I was really surprised the amount of level you get when designing IP SLA into an infrastructure for monitoring. It's definitely one of the more engaging topics, and the deeper you get into the discussion the more you get to understand the traffic…

Great! Thank you for the for letting me know! Now to get the module updated!

Glad you found this post helpful!

Definitely agree with you! Getting the perspective from the end user is worth-while and can easily point to us to desktop related issues, quickly ruling out the network. (As long as it really isn't the network ) It can definitely save us a good amount of troublehooting!

Sometimes the easy way is the best way. Auto-QoS takes care of a good portion of the leg work from a layer-2 perspective.

This has been a great discussion and I wanted to let every know, I've consolidated these ideas into another document over the VoIP Management forum! This way all the great ideas are in a single post! Sample VoIP Readiness Checklist!

I would start with looking through some configuration guides for the networking equipment in your environment. Some vendors (IE: Cisco) have configuration guides for specific IOS versions that cover the explanation and configuration of each of the individual SLA operations that are supported. (the information might be a…

Currently when assigning a baseline, I can only filter by 'Machine Type', 'Status', & 'Vendor' if I had the ability to filter based on custom properties. That would be perfect.

+1 for this. This would be extremely beneficial.

Good call out there, you can have the perfect marking and queuing policies on your CE equipment but unless the WAN provider is honoring those markings properly it was all nothing. WAN transport is a very important aspect of a good QoS design.

My apologies Katie I did not see your comment until now. Is it too late to participate?

Another great call out there Christopher Good many of the larger vendors out there like Cisco provide SNMP access for monitoring queuing class-maps for drops, and NetFlow is a commonly overlooked tool for QoS planning.

With a piece-meal deployment, just make sure you mark & queue along the entire path during each phase. Marking and queuing in one part of the network but not the other may negate your prioritization.

O wow, I can't believe I forgot about wireshark! And to think I've used that quite a few times to listen to VoIP calls to troubleshoot! I had an interesting issue in the past where VoIP conversation would sound crystal clear in the capture but sound 'staticey' to the user, turned out to be a software caveat with the PVDM…

Very trueDeltona there are those times when you may need to trust the marking from end-devices. You are definitely correct about MS Lync, I've seen way more Lync deployments in the enterprise than soft-phone software running as desktop applications.

It's definitely a useful tool, and as wbrown mentioned you should be able to perform a DNS request in the same operation providing even more insight into web performance.

+1 any update on this feature request?

I did a solarwinds deployment for an MSP and we had done the same, assigned a custom property "CustomerName" and used the Editor to sort by customer and assign customer details in bulk. Worked out nicely, but pre-set profiles would be cool just to auto-fill the customer email addresses

I had demo'ed a few Cascade Express boxes & Cascade Pilot earlier this year, I was really impressed with them definitely a great application performance tool! Pilot was also extremely useful definitely made it easier to go through pcaps, and grabbing pcaps directly off appliance was a nice plus.

Agreed! The historical information allows you baseline the network the network on a completely different level, allowing you trend different applications down to the hour making it much easier to do any necessary capacity planning over extended periods of time.

Yes this is would be extremely beneficial. Especially that have to gather configurations for various compliance bodies.

I'll upload the UnDP's in my post to the content exchange to get you started :-) Sometimes when/if I have spare time at work I fire up the MIB Browser and just go searching a particular part of the tree to see what's there. It's surprising how much good information is in there just waiting to get polled.

You know I probably have to re-visit NAMs. I haven't looked at a NAM in quite a few years. They've probably gotten much better since the last version I worked with them

Great article, and secretly something I've been thinking about in the back of mind. Years ago, when I stood up my first NMS the fact I could monitor a status of some of the performance metrics in my network; I was completely ecstatic at the visibility provided by the tool. Nowadays however those same metrics that wow-ed me…

This would be a great addition, have the users fill out the desired information and them IPAM managers have approve/deny/update the requested IP address request. I would only ask that form be customizable with required fields and custom fields.