Cisco Unified Communications (UC) enables your employees to collaborate seamlessly in real time across geographies and devices. Such functionality is vital for modern businesses whose employees may work from the office, the road or the home. Without it, employees become disconnected and productivity plummets.

Given its impact on employee productivity, it is essential that your Cisco UC solution operates at peak performance. Dropped calls, poor voice or video quality, and other issues that hinder your employees’ ability to collaborate must be avoided.

Keep your employees connected by assuring the performance and availability of your Cisco UC deployment with Cisco Unified Communications monitoring and optional managed services from Optanix.

What is Cisco Unified Communications?

Cisco Unified Communications solutions deliver integrated voice, video, mobility, presence services and more across endpoints, devices and applications. Environments comprised of so many varied and distributed technologies are technically complex and thereby difficult to manage.

A Cisco UC Success Story

When one of Europe’s largest FinTech companies grew dissatisfied with its managed service provider, they brought in Optanix to address their network performance and availability issues. At go-live, over 3,800 endpoints, 16 Cisco UC servers and 28 Cisco UCCE servers – along with supporting network infrastructure – were under management by Optanix.

37 seconds for Optanix Platform to identify issues, diagnose root cause and notify Optanix Support Center staff

99.8% reduction in incident volume driven by the Optanix Platform

93% of incidents proactively detected by Optanix Platform without customer having to report a service issue

By correlating events and automatically validating incidents, the Optanix Platform has reduced incident volumes by 99.8% for the customer. This reduction ensures that Optanix support center engineers spend their time working on real issues for the customer rather than drowning in noise.

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Trust In Optanix’s UC Credentials

Optanix has over three million total endpoints under management

Optanix holds a Cisco Advanced Collaboration Architecture Specialization

Optanix is a Cisco Preferred Solution Partner for monitoring of UC deployments

100% of L2 and L3 engineers in the Optanix support center hold Cisco certifications

Do A Deep Dive On Our Cisco UCCE Capabilities.

Erase Resolution Times With Cisco UC Monitoring Software

Cisco Unified Communications relies on many different components. Any problems with the network, servers, business applications, communications media, endpoints or consumer applications that are part of the Cisco UC system will cause performance degradations or outages. In turn, those degradations and outages will hinder employee collaboration and productivity.

Whenever part of your Cisco UC system is experiencing issues, it is critical to fix the offending issues quickly, and even better to avoid them altogether. But with the disparate point tools commonly used to manage various Cisco UC components, it is difficult and time consuming to troubleshoot issues and nearly impossible to predict them.

Achieve predictive and proactive service assurance across the entire infrastructure stack supporting your Cisco UC deployment with the Optanix Platform. The platform delivers actionable intelligence for prioritizing and addressing problems before they impact your critical Cisco UC services to improve employee productivity and reduce IT costs.

The Optanix Platform for Cisco Unified Communications

The Optanix Platform has been purpose-built to monitor and manage Cisco UC by Cisco experts – including several CCIEs – and has achieved Cisco Compatible certification for UC deployments. It helps you achieve unprecedented performance and availability for Cisco UC deployments by combining its innovative core capabilities with UC-specific features and functionality typically only found in point tools.

 

Increase management accuracy via the Optanix Platform’s ability to automatically discover major Cisco UC application features, such as Cisco Unity and Cisco Unified SIP Proxy (CUSP). The platform also provides standard UC dashboards and reports that are generated based on the automatic discovery of the environment. These dashboards and reports are automatically updated to reflect moves, adds and changes.

Reduce mean time to notify (MTTN) and mean time to repair (MTTR) with the Optanix Platform’s ability to conduct full-stack monitoring and end-to-end management for Cisco UC environments. This unique approach to UC monitoring and management enables the platform to detect, pinpoint and alert on both new and impending issues that impact UC, whether the issues are specific to UC or they stem from the underlying IT infrastructure.

Troubleshoot call quality issues in real time versus attempting to do so after a call is over via access to centralized, real-time collaboration statistics and interactive intra-call statistics based on endpoint data. The Optanix Platform’s call quality dashboard provides access to network statistics as well as audio, video and presentation data that can be leveraged to determine if call quality issues are related to technology or user error.

In addition to real-time data, the dashboard provides easy access to historical CDR/CMR data such as:

  • Number of calls
  • Jitter
  • Latency
  • Packet loss
  • Mean opinion score (MOS)

Finally, the dashboard also includes information on resource constraints which enable you to quickly identify configuration issues and capacity problems.

Enhance your ability to resolve Cisco UC issues that negatively impact user experience with location-based reporting capabilities. Through the Optanix Platform’s collaboration quality dashboard, you are able to see which locations in your network are communicating with one another and track relevant statistics on their interactions.

In one real-world example, a large, distributed enterprise was receiving complaints about poor telepresence experience from executives, but only when those executives were communicating directly with a specific conference room. The problem was easily tracked down by analyzing location-based data in the collaboration quality dashboard. It did not otherwise show up as a problem since such calls were infrequent and buried amongst hundreds of thousands of other calls.

Gain a clear understanding of the source of Cisco UC performance and availability issues so that you can more efficiently and effectively resolve them with the Optanix Platform’s call test tool. The tool works by conducting synthetic transactions in which logical phones call each other on a regular basis. This allows call paths and other relevant elements to be checked.

Since calls are controlled by humans, it can be hard to determine if short calls, connection failures and other problems are caused by technology or human activity (e.g., because someone placed a call then immediately hung up). Such problems can also be brought on by outside forces, like a call quality issue caused by environmental background noise. Synthetic transactions enhance your ability to troubleshoot these problems as they eliminate the unknown quantity of unpredictable human tendencies from the equation.

Gain easy access to capacity data on physical and logical resources such as SIP trunks via the Optanix Platform’s trunk traffic reports. This data be compared against errors, such as media resource exhausted alerts, that trigger even though the trunk may only be running at 30% capacity. In such cases, the platform allows further troubleshooting to be conducted to determine if the problem is being caused by a segmentation and policy configuration error or if there is a device issue.

Trunk traffic reports also show the busiest times of the week and month, as well as peak loads. This information is important for capacity planning purposes as it can indicate if additional bandwidth is required or if a reduction that will decrease costs without sacrificing call quality is possible.

Determine how to best utilize Cisco UC technologies – and thus maximize the return on your investment in UC – with the aid of statistics on system use available in the Optanix Platform.

For example, the platform can indicate whether people are using telepresence rooms to communicate with different locations, or if they are using the equipment in those rooms as local displays for people meeting face to face. This information enables the company to make a decision on how to maximize their investment in telepresence equipment. They may opt to redeploy the equipment to a more useful location, or simply provide employees training on its proper use.

Eliminate the noise common in management deployments relying on multiple point tools with a platform that integrates UC-specific features with powerful core capabilities – such as Root Cause Analysis (RCA), Smart Analytics and Business Impact Monitoring (BIM) – to provide a best-of-breed solution.

Talk To Us About Your Cisco Unified Communications Needs.

Achieve Peak UC Performance With Cisco UC Managed Services

Cisco Unified Communications solutions deliver integration of a diverse array of collaboration tools: IP telephony for voice calling, web and video conferencing, voicemail, mobility, desktop sharing, instant messaging and presence, and more. To ensure seamless user experiences and real-time communications are possible across all these tools at all times, high levels of vigilance are required.

Unfortunately, at a time when enterprises expect their IT departments to focus primarily on strategic initiatives, giving undivided attention to IT operations management is not always a possibility. As a result, the performance and availability of Cisco UC solutions – and thus also the employee collaboration and productivity they enable – will suffer.

Direct internal resources toward high-value IT projects without sacrificing the performance of your Cisco UC solution by leveraging UC managed services from Optanix. Through the Optanix Remote Management Service (RMS), the UC experts in the Optanix NOC work to ensure your UC solution is operating at peak performance, freeing your employees to focus on facilitating innovation and driving revenue.

Learn more about Optanix’s Cisco managed services expertise >>

See How the Optanix Platform Can Eliminate Issues In Your UCCE Environment.