Need for Proactive Monitoring of Unified Communications System

[Ovais Iqbal]

Hi Community,

What are your thoughts on the importance of proactively Monitoring and Managing UC system on an ongoing basis? I have seen in several cases where specially small to mid size customers are some times missing this component, what could be the possible reasons? I can think of some as listed below.

- Proactive Monitoring requirements are generally excluded from the early sales discussion with the customer?

- Monitoring and Management products are expensive?

- Customers are not fully aware of what is out there?

- More load on customer's operations staff? or too many isolated tools to manage?

- Difficult to decide on which product to use?

- Or some customers think that link up/down plus some basic service monitoring from their existing NMS system would be enough?

What do you think? and will you share please?

Thanks

Ovais.

[T Ringwelski]

Well this is a great question and thread, an area that typically does not get a lot of attention, here are some of the tools I have used recommended in the past, of course it always depends on the resources to monitor manage, and mitigate.

Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance, this tool has come along way and do like it.

LiveAction is another good tool also on the Cisco GPL.

Cisco RTMT which is part of CUCM ( more a troubleshooting tool than a monitoring tool

There are several outside the Cisco umbrella also. this is a start and interesting to see some additional responses.

Regards,

Todd