Taming the Beast: IP-PBX Management for Cisco, Avaya and Alcatel-LucentTaming the Beast: IP-PBX Management for Cisco, Avaya and Alcatel-Lucent

There are those who remain leery of IP telephony. Nothing you say will convince them that today's IP-PBX systems are as reliable as the good old TDM systems they love.

Then there are those of us who live in reality. IP-PBX products have proven themselves. There's really no need to debate it anymore.

Miercom conducts regular reviews of IP telephony products including IP-PBX systems. Of particular interest we have found, while conducting these reviews, distinct differences in the tools being sold to manage those systems. Since much of that reliability and usefulness we mentioned is grounded in the proper set-up, maintenance and updating of IP-PBX networks, a clunky IP-PBX management product can turn an otherwise great communication array into a dead duck. That's bad enough, but even worse are the inevitable derisive, wise-guy comments from those grizzled old holdouts.

With that in mind, Miercom took a close look at three IP-PBX management products currently available from Cisco, Avaya and Alcatel-Lucent. They all did a great job, but as usual there are some differences.

Cisco's IP-PBX management product is called the Cisco Unified Communications Management Suite. It is a collection of four applications: the Unified Service Statistics Manager, Unified Service Monitor, Unified Provisioning Manager and Unified Operations Manager. Cisco markets the suite as being designed to provide full product lifecycle management from pre-assessment to post-deployment. We looked at management for the entire IP-PBX solution.

Overall, this is one of the very first packages we saw that does try to comprehensively cover all aspects of the lifecycle of a PBX, from getting it running and quickly provisioned, to handling day-to-day operations. With all of its pieces, we could pull the statistics out and dump them into another analytical package for further review. All applications are what we call "Ciscotized." They all operate within the realm of Cisco's overall look and feel.

Unified Provisioning Manager

This product is targeted at enterprises that have 500 or more phones deployed. As the name implies, Unified Provisioning Manager is designed for deployment scenarios of new IP-PBX installations. It requires a dedicated server with four GB of RAM and a 3-GHz processor. Unified Provisioning Manager runs on Windows 2003 Server SE and has a Web-based interface that requires Microsoft IE v6 or later.

Operating with a single, permanent license, it sets up devices – meaning call processors and other unified communication units. Unified Provisioning Manager also sets up deployment for configuration of domains and service areas, and it helps with batch deployments.

After the system is up and running properly, Unified Provisioning Manager is still useful. It tracks inventory, advising the administrator of extension availability and types of phones required for specific areas of the company or workgroups. Administrators can define employee roles and telephony rights. This tool significantly reduced time and cost of deployment because it steps you through the entire process and helps avoid errors.

Unified Operations Manager

Cisco’s Unified Operations Manager is used for general PBX management, troubleshooting and fault notification. It is your typical NOC application, with a dashboard view that shows where you can set up service levels for specific groups of phones. The system can issue alerts in a number of ways, including e-mails and audible tones. We found Unified Operation Manager easy to use and responsive when we created issues that caused alerts.

The Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) shows which devices are connected to each other and provides performance statistics, such as how many calls were handled and how many trunks are up.

You can also launch a device center which will do an SNMP “walk” to communicate with devices on a management level and pull pertinent information from them. Also, from that graphical screen you can suspend viewing of selected devices. So if you know somebody is doing an upgrade on a piece of hardware, you can tell the Unified Operations Manager to ignore the device and stop sending off alerts.

There's a diagnostic tab to set up tests to occur on scheduled and periodic basis, a tab for reporting, a tab for notification services, a device tab that activates a network search for telephony devices, and an administrative tab where you set up users and overall operations.

Unified Service Monitor

The Unified Service Monitor is used for reporting, configuration of thresholds and monitoring of those thresholds for voice quality. It does this by looking at either Cisco Voice Transmission Quality (VTQ) readings (described by Cisco as an endpoint MOS estimation algorithm “that represents the weighted estimate of ‘average user’ annoyance caused by effective packet loss”); or Cisco 1040 probes that can be installed at remote sites. The Unified Service Monitor keeps track of all the phones physically deployed and the associated licenses.

We liked the way the Unified Service Monitor can be launched directly from the Unified Operations Manager, and that it can feed its findings up to the Cisco Unified Service Statistics Manager.

Unified Service Statistics Manager

This piece basically does historical reporting, analysis and trending. It starts with a dashboard view that can be customized with your specific reports, such as bandwidth, trunk utilization, quality and call volume. It is on a dedicated server.

The Unified Service Statistics Manager can be used for monitoring trunk utilization. If you’re using T1 between two offices, you can look at trending over the past 3 months to see if you are consuming more bandwidth over time on that pipe. It’s a pretty basic, classical historical reporting engine with a nice dashboard that can be customized.

Alcatel-Lucent's IP-PBX management offering is called the Alcatel OmniVista 4760. It is a modular suite that runs in client-server configuration on a server running Windows XP or Windows 2003 Server. The applications are accessible through a Web browser or a Java client.

For enterprises with more than 500 users on their PBX, Alcatel-Lucent recommends using Windows 2003 Server. Additionally, if you have a very large installation, the product's Accounting portion can be split off onto a separate server.

It's all secured via SSL, SSH and Secure FTP. You can encrypt and protect everything you're managing. The system as a whole can support up to 400 nodes or 50,000 users. You can log-in and manage multiple nodes at the same time. A nice feature allows views to be customized by the administrators. Any changes made are highlighted in an icon until they are actually applied and saved.

The OmniVista 4760 is divided into several application modules including: LDAP Directory, Configuration, Accounting, Performance, Network Topology and Alarm Notification. In general, we found the product to be very straightforward, intuitive and simple to use.

LDAP Directory

The LDAP Directory module is used for configuring all the LDAP directories, such as the OmniPCX database LDAP directory. If a company has multiple buildings on the same campus and separate PBXs, these devices can be configured to communicate, to update and replicate each other's directories.

Because this is a full LDAP directory, confidentiality levels can be configured to protect the users’ information from anyone else. Since the application is Web based, it can be accessed from any browser or from any network workstation via a directory client.

Configuration

This module presents network managers with a graphical interface for all network objects. This is the place where moves, adds and changes are handled. We were able to do bulk edits, cut-and-paste users, and import/export with a Microsoft Excel file. The visual representations of the phones and button assignments were nice. It also allows the assignment of users and MAC addresses. The system pushes down a template with button mapping and extensions. One of the nicest features of the Alcatel system is that profiles can be created that can be used to manage multiple phone types. The setup must be done carefully, but if templates are properly configured and create a hierarchy, high-end phones with numerous buttons are automatically set-up with all the features; while those devices with fewer buttons are mapped to the best of the Configuration module's capability. This is a new feature that can be a time and resource saver.

Also, when administrators log in they can see the state of individual phones, such as if they are locked or unlocked, and change those states. The configuration tool, which matches its interface to the platform being managed, can configure media gateways and translations management. The module allows class-of-service control, allowing the manager to restrict employee telephony rights (such as the ability to dial internationally). You can also set up phone attendants and configure groups. The module provides some rudimentary call-center functionality, including the ability to create circular, sequential and parallel hunt groups.

In the Configuration module, administrators can configure tenanting so that various groups of tenants sharing a divided PBX can manage their portions of the phone system. The system can support up to 1,000 tenants and about 30 domains.

Accounting

This call-monitoring module pools all the call detail records (CDR) and serves as the place where you can apply imported carrier tariffs (i.e., the calling fees charged by the telephone companies).

We liked the cost calculator capability of the application, which matches the company's CDRs to imported tariff sheets. This will show potential savings by switching providers. These comparisons are presented in easy-to-read graphics, and the application provides reports in a number of formats that can be e-mailed.

Performance

The Performance module is an analysis tool for service quality of various parts of the network. It provides managers with detailed information pertaining to network response time, VoIP traffic and quality and other areas. The module includes templates that can be used to generate reports which can be scheduled by the administrator.

Network Topology

This module provides a nice, graphical view of the network. We found it easy to overlay alarm information for various PBX sites. When a red alarm showed up, we could drill down to the problematic component. A nice feature is the way the application allows you to import your own background images. For example, you can import a map of the country that will graphically show trunks and other network segments. The topology map is animated in real time, and clicking on the represented objects launches the Configuration module.

Alarm Notification

Five levels of color-coded alarms are provided. You can drill down on them to configure the component that caused the alarm, and you can add notes to various alarms. If there's one alarm you periodically get – say, for example, that traffic flooding regularly occurs in one site and triggers identical alarms -- you can note that recurring tendency in the alarm. There is no expert analysis function, but we liked the way the screen updates automatically when new alarms are generated. In the lab, we caused faults and watched as they appeared almost instantly on the screen. Audio alerts are also available.

Other Tools

The OmniVista 4760 has a reporting function that is broken into six pre-defined areas: Accounting, traffic analysis, thresholds, VoIP, alarms and templates (custom templates for reports). It's an Alcatel-developed reporting engine, not Crystal Reports. You can schedule them to be written, sent to a printer, e-mail, text file, Excel file, XML file or PDF.

There is also a scheduler that shows green if a job was successful and red if it wasn’t. Additionally, a maintenance tasks tool takes care of software and firmware upgrades and does basic maintenance tasks such as defrags and backups.

Avaya's IP-PBX management suite comes in a number of pieces under the Avaya Integrated Management umbrella, a component of the company's Communication Architecture. The applications are grouped into three areas: Application Administration, Provisioning/Network Management and Alarming/Monitoring.

The various programs are more distinct from each other than such pieces are in the Cisco and Alcatel efforts. The advantage of such an a la carte design is that administrators can choose to use only the segments they want, and can continue using older IP-PBX management products with which they remain happy.

While some network administrators might not like switching from one application to another, it should be noted the applications can be cross-launched. So if you see a fault -- and drill down to determine, for instance, that the problem is a device that can't connect to the network because its IP address is wrong -- you can then launch the Site Administrator application and go right to the device to change the configuration.

Application Administration

The main product under Application Administration is Avaya's Site Administration, a Windows PC-based program used for the main IP-PBX administration. This is where users are configured and templating of phones takes place, and classes of service are established. The tool presents a nice graphical representation of the phones, and we liked the way it even includes images of phones with the available expansion packs. The application will detect and show the expansion packs when they're installed.

Site Administration includes a template for printing the paper labels that go into phones. It can do standard bulk imports and exports of user information and – for all you hard-core PBX pros -- it can go into a terminal emulation mode to present an almost command-line interface.

There is reporting functionality in Site Administration for standard items such as trunk utilization of stations and CDR data.

One other nice tool within the Site Administrator is the Avaya Multi-site Administrator, which allows multiple managers to manage multiple systems.

Another Application Administration tool is the Avaya Voice Announcement manager. This provides for the recording, or uploading, and management of voice announcements that are stored as .WAV files.

Provisioning and Network Management

Under this umbrella, we find the Provisioning and Installation Manager, a tool that helps in the quick deployment of new equipment by eliminating the hassle of one-at-a-time setups. You can define custom templates for large groups as well as device profiles.

Another application in this silo is the Secure Access Administration tool. It's here that network administrators can manage user access rights and privileges. You can deploy defined user lists to large batches of devices.

The IP Address Manager, as the name suggests, allows administrators to easily find IP addresses or hosts. The tool automatically discovers duplicate IP addresses or policy violations and it can be used to make, export or print reports.

The Software Update Manager can be used to automatically download software updates as well as point out devices that need updates and patches. It also handles distributing firmware updates to remote offices. This Web-based tool definitely had the Avaya one-X graphical look and feel. When you go into the application, you can very clearly see all Avaya pieces and what firmware versions they are running. It knows what the current version is, and when you click on a device, the tool checks the service contract and will download the new material. Alarming and Monitoring

Under this roof is the Avaya Fault & Performance manager, a Web-based application through which you can see all the alarms and errors for a given system. You can select an alarm and drill down into it to find out its cause, and Avaya usually provides a hyperlink to the troubled device's documentation. Additionally, you can usually launch a helper application, a program that comes pretty close to providing expert diagnostics.

The Fault & Performance Manager allows you to run test commands that will help clear alarms and can be configured to send the alarms via e-mail or as SMS messages. Alarming is a standard network operation and all can be dumped out to a syslog server.

There’s also the VoIP Monitoring Manager, which does VoIP quality monitoring and can warn network managers of potential problems that stand to hamper voice quality.

The last dish in the Avaya buffet is the SMON Manager. This traffic monitoring tool is designed for those networks that use Avaya “Cajun”-brand Ethernet and gigabit Ethernet switches for point-to-point transmissions. A VoIP port works with the VoIP Monitoring Manager and allows administrators to filter network information so they can see activity only on ports with IP phones.

Conclusion

All of these vendors’ tools do an exemplary job when it comes to providing IP-PBX management capability. The vendors have stuffed their products with state-of-the art tools. The programs offer administrators not only the devices they need day in and day out, but also a good number of advanced tools that might only be used occasionally but are extremely valuable when one of "those days" comes around.

In the right hands, the management products being offered by Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent and Avaya will ensure that IP-PBXs are optimally configured and stay running reliably as designed.

Rob Smithers is CEO of Miercom Consulting and Integration and provides independent testing services for No Jitter.