NetQoS Unified Communications Monitor 2.0 Launches

NetQoS today launched its first unified communications focused management tool called NetQoS Unified Communications (UC) Monitor. NetQoS is broadening the focus of its formerly named VoIP Monitor product to reflect the growing role and functionality of unified communications. NetQoS UC Monitor 2.0 supports voice and video quality metrics in a Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) environment as well as enhanced diagnostics and reporting for Cisco IP telephony environments.

In my conversation with NetQoS I asked them what the upgrade/migration path was for current customers, and they said existing customers would be upgraded to NetQoS UC Monitor 2.0 free of charge. One interesting feature in NetQoS UC Monitor 2.0 is that it can adjust the MOS alerting thresholds based on codec. For instance, Microsoft’s RTAudio FEC codec can have a lower MOS score than other codecs, but sound just as good than other codecs with a higher MOS score. Screenshot of the codec thresholds:

UC Monitor adds support for monitoring both voice and video in a Microsoft OCS environment and it passively monitors call setup flows between IP phones and their call server(s) including ‘call setup′ and end-of-call quality statistics. It also actively queries voice gateways for end of call statistics. Additionally, it passively receives QoE reports from Microsoft’s QoE Monitoring Server, including call setup failures, and audio and video metrics

Here’s some screenshots of the tool in action: