What is UC Monitor? › Call Performance Monitoring

Call Performance Monitoring

UC Monitor measures and tracks the audio and video performance of calls, and alerts you when performance levels fall below a threshold. Call performance monitoring consists of two components that contribute to user perception of call quality:

• Call setup monitoring, to ensure that users can initiate and complete calls.
• Call quality monitoring, to gauge the clarity of the audio or image in the conversation.

UC Monitor performs comprehensive, end-to-end monitoring of unified communications, which is a simple term that can mask a complex reality:

• Audio and video signals travel over your data network and are subject to the complexities and fluctuations of all the other traffic sharing the links.
• Multiple equipment vendors have implemented functions using multiple, sometimes proprietary, protocols.
• One VoIP call can involve two IP telephones and their call server. Or it can involve a telephone in the PSTN, an IP telephone, a voice gateway, and a call server.
• Problems with call setup or call quality can occur at several network locations.

In a Cisco environment, the collector passively monitors call setup flows at two points in their passage through the network:

• Between VoIP endpoints and the Unified Communications Manager server
• Between call servers and voice gateways

The collector also performs the following types of monitoring when Cisco hardware is deployed: