| CA Technologies |
1.0 Welcome to Release 3.5
1.1 New in this Release
1.2 Support for CA Performance Center
1.3 Supported Systems and Devices
1.3.1 Avaya Support
1.3.2 Cisco Support
1.3.3 Microsoft Support
1.4 Upgrade Support
1.5 Scalability Considerations and Report Performance
1.6 Bandwidth Considerations
1.7 Single Sign-On
1.8 Third-Party Software License Agreements
2.0 Known Issues
2.1 Large queries affect dashboard views in CA Performance Center
2.2 Call Quality Breakdown view fails in NetQoS Performance Center 6.1
2.3 Configuration changes affect accuracy of the Midstream Details table
2.4 Jitter values for medianet may be inaccurate
2.5 Incorrect latency value for Cisco phone models 8941 and 8945
2.6 Some video calls are classified as audio calls
2.7 Long-running calls may be reported inaccurately
2.8 Purging abandoned call data may be time-consuming
2.9 Midstream devices may have two classifications in CA Performance Center
2.10 Login fails after change to SSO configuration and upgrade
2.11 Issues with Cisco phone models 9971, 9951, 8961, with firmware 9.1(2) or earlier
2.12 Short calls may not be correlated correctly with call legs
2.13 Dashboard times out when database and time frame are large
2.14 Voice Interfaces and Call Watch menus do not appear after a call server is discovered
2.15 Initial addition of collector does not read information such as version or license
2.16 Maximum jitter is less than average jitter for gateway calls
2.17 High concealment ratios when no packets received
2.18 No codec identification for inbound call streams
2.19 Call correlation problem when successive calls use same RTP port
2.20 Call Performance views: Do not refresh the screen every 60 seconds
2.21 Call Watch Details: Ten-second call shows only MOS value
CA Unified Communications Monitor (UC Monitor) ensures the performance of your unified communications systems. UC Monitor employs passive monitoring to maintain a continuous record of setup traffic and of the quality of audio and video calls.
These Release Notes provide information about the enhancements and open issues in UC Monitor version 3.5. This information supplements and supersedes information in the product documentation.
UC Monitor version 3.5 provides the following enhancements:
In addition, this release resolves the following issue:
UC Monitor version 3.5 is supported as a data source for CA Performance Center version 2.0 (and later) and CA NetQoS Performance Center version 6.1. Specific versions of each product are required to support selected features.
Important: Do not install UC Monitor on the same server as CA NetQoS Performance Center.
This section provides the most recent information available about the unified communications systems that you can monitor with UC Monitor. The CA Quality Assurance team tested all systems and devices that are discussed in this section. Other systems and devices may work but have not been tested.
For information about configuring supported systems so that they work seamlessly with UC Monitor, see the CA Unified Communications Monitor Installation Guide.
UC Monitor supports the following Avaya unified communications systems and devices. One management console can process a maximum of 4500 simultaneous calls (roughly 90,000 calls per hour) without an impact to performance. The number of phones and the number of collectors are irrelevant.
| Systems and Devices | Notes |
|---|---|
| Avaya Communications Manager | Versions 3, 4, 5x |
| Avaya Aura Communication Manager | Versions 5.2 and 6.0. Later versions may work but have not been tested. |
| Avaya voice gateways that send RTCP data for reporting call quality | |
| Avaya phones that send RTCP data for reporting call quality |
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UC Monitor supports the following Cisco unified communications systems and devices. CA Technologies tested UC Monitor with gateways of the indicated types using the major call setup protocols: SIP, H.323, and MGCP. UC Monitor supports call volumes of up to ten million calls per month.
| Systems and Devices | Notes |
|---|---|
| Cisco Unified Communications Manager | Versions 4.2 through 9.0. Later versions may work but have not been tested. Note: Support for versions 8.0 and later is available only with UC Monitor versions 3.1 and later. |
| Cisco Unified Border Element (CUBE), Enterprise Edition | The device on which CUBE is enabled is discovered as a Session Border Controller and appears in the management console on the Other Devices page.
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| Cisco voice gateways, with T1/E1-PRI connections | Including the H.323 and MGCP protocols and SIP trunks to voice gateways. |
| Analog-type gateways |
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| Cisco VG-224 gateways |
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| Cisco ATA 186 analog telephone adapters |
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| Catalyst 6000 WS-X6608-T1/E1 Blade for Voice |
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| Cisco Unified IP phones |
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| Cisco Unified IP phones, running in advanced SIP mode | 7906, 7911, 7941, 7961, 7970, 7971 Note: Install the latest firmware for these phones. |
| Cisco IP Communicator softphone |
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| Cisco Unified Personal Communicator, version 7.0 |
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| Medianet-enabled devices | UC Monitor supports Cisco devices that send medianet performance information. For more information, consult the Cisco documentation for Cisco Networking Capabilities for Medianet. |
| Phone localization settings | UC Monitor supports the following settings. Other settings may work, but have not been tested.
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UC Monitor supports the following Microsoft unified communications systems and devices:
| Systems and Devices | Notes |
|---|---|
| Microsoft Lync Server 2013 | With the Quality of Experience Monitoring Server installed |
| Microsoft Lync Server 2010 | Including Enterprise and Standard Editions |
| Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 | Including Enterprise and Standard Editions |
| Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 | With the Quality of Experience Monitoring Server installed |
| Microsoft Office Communications Server Mediation Server | |
| Microsoft Office Communications Server A/V MCU (Conferencing Server) | |
| Messenger for Mac 7 | |
Tested devices:
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Other devices may work but have not been tested. |
Notes:
Features added with a newer version of UC Monitor are supported when new data is available. For new reports, data begins to be collected immediately. However, some data rollups, such as hourly call volumes, become available one hour after the upgrade completes.
Upgrade to UC Monitor 3.5 is supported only from versions of UC Monitor running on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2. For versions of UC Monitor running on Microsoft Windows Server 2003, upgrade to at least version 3.3 on a server running Windows Server 2008 R2. Then you can upgrade to version 3.5.
For complete information about upgrading, including how to upgrade to a new operating system, see the CA Unified Communications Monitor Upgrade Guide.
Some VoIP equipment vendors discuss scalability in terms of the number of IP phone users or the expected number of calls. Others use the terms busy hour call completions (BHCC) and busy hour call attempts (BHCA). These terms represent the number of calls or call attempts that can be processed during the busiest hours of the day.
The UC Monitor components, particularly the collector, support a BHCA of 25,000. In laboratory testing, the collector handled a higher BHCA. The collector is designed to handle temporary situations where the volume of VoIP traffic is far greater than normal.
Scalability affects report performance. Generally, the time necessary for report queries to complete depends on the size of the database and the number of Locations and media devices.
The following guidelines can help you understand what to expect from the management console with a large UC Monitor deployment:
Consult the following guidelines to determine how much bandwidth you need for normal communication from a monitored device to the collector, or from the collector to the management console.
Note: A Microsoft video call consumes approximately twice as much bandwidth as an audio call.
Single Sign-On is the authentication scheme for CA Performance Center and all supported data sources. Once they are authenticated to CA Performance Center, users can navigate among the console and registered data sources without signing in a second time.
By enabling navigation among separate product interfaces, Single Sign-On helps ensure a seamless drilldown experience for operators who are analyzing performance and status data. For example, if a user logs in to CA Performance Center and then follows a drilldown path to the data source interface, that user does not log in again.
CA Performance Center uses a distributed architecture. An instance of the Single Sign-On website is automatically installed on every server where a supported data source or CA Performance Center is installed. The distributed architecture lets users log in to individual CA data source products by logging in to the servers where these products are running.
Third-party software was used in the creation of UC Monitor. All third-party software was used in accordance with the terms and conditions for use, reproduction, and distribution as defined by the applicable license agreements.
Information about third-party license agreements is provided in the following document, which is installed automatically with the UC Monitor software:
<install path>:\CA\ThirdPartyContent\UCM_ThirdPartyContent.txt
This section describes known issues and suggests workarounds.
The views in the Unified Communications Dashboards in CA Performance Center impose no limit to the size of a query. You can query a time frame as large or as small as you want. However, performance of these views is adversely affected by query results that are larger than the amount supported by reports in the UC Monitor management console. UC Monitor reports support a maximum of 10 million calls per month. For more information, see the topic "Managing the UC Monitor Database" in the online help.
The Call Quality Breakdown view fails with the following error:
The given key was not present in the dictionary.
The view is available from the Enterprise, Unified Communications, and VoIP dashboards.
Contact CA Support for assistance in resolving this issue.
The Midstream Details table identifies the ingress and egress interfaces associated with a medianet-enabled router. Each interface is associated with an ifIndex. If a change to a router’s configuration associates the ifIndex with a different interface, the table is updated to reflect the new interface name. The new interface name may not be the name that you originally associated with the call.
Workaround: None. The inaccurate data is replaced as older midstream data is purged.
For Cisco’s initial support for medianet, the jitter and max jitter values can be high and inaccurate for streams with codecs that use a non-default clock rate. Basically, the router has to assume a certain clock rate. If the clock rate does not match the rate that the codec needs, the resulting jitter calculations are incorrect.
Workaround: Configure IOS to be aware of the clock rate by codec and RTP payload type. Identify the audio and video applications on your network, including the associated codecs, RTP payload types, and clock rates. For more information, see the Cisco document titled Cisco IOS Media Monitoring Command Reference. In the document, search for “clock-rate (policy RTP).”
In our testing, these phones returned incorrect latency values. We have reported this issue to Cisco.
Medianet data can indicate whether a call is a video call or an audio call. If this information is not available from medianet data, UC Monitor bases the call type on the observed bandwidth of the call. Calls with lower bandwidth are classified as audio. Therefore, the number of audio calls in reports can be higher than actual. When troubleshooting a call, try filtering by audio media rather than video to find a particular call.
UC Monitor limits call duration to 12 hours. After 12 hours, UC Monitor stops monitoring the call and reports call metrics in the management console. The call duration is inaccurate because the call was not completed. In addition, if the call continues longer than 12 hours, UC Monitor may begin monitoring the call again, with a new origination time.
During automatic database maintenance, the first time that abandoned call data is purged can substantially increase the maintenance period. The purging of three to four million abandoned calls can take 30 minutes more than usual. During a large manual purge of abandoned call data, the management console can time out, although the purge operation continues to run.
If you registered UC Monitor as a data source for CA Performance Center, you can include medianet-enabled devices (midstream devices) in groups. In the Add Device List in CA Performance Center, midstream devices are identified with a type of “Other.” However, if another registered data source has also discovered the device, the device can appear in the Add Device List as a “Router” type.
Logging in to UC Monitor can fail in the following circumstance, although drilling down from CA Performance Center is successful:
Upgrading to UC Monitor 3.3 or later includes an upgrade to SSO version 7.0, which does not override changes to the SSO configuration. Therefore, SSO is improperly configured and UC Monitor does not allow direct logins.
Workarounds:
Note: You cannot perform this workaround after upgrading.
In our testing, we found the following issues:
When short calls are consecutive in environments that reuse ports, such as Avaya environments, UC Monitor may not be able to correlate call legs, including medianet streams, to their respective calls.
When you select an interval of at least one week, the Unified Communications Dashboard in CA NetQoS Performance Center does not fully render the views when the UC Monitor database contains at least ten million calls.
Workaround: Split some of the UC Monitor data views into two custom CA Performance Center reports. For example, create a custom report named “Performance” to include the Worst Locations and Worst Phones views. Then, create a “Volume” report to contain the rest of the views that are associated with the Capacity Planning reports. With fewer views, the dashboard is rendered successfully.
Occasionally, two navigation links do not appear after a Cisco or Avaya call server is discovered:
Workaround: Log out from the management console, and then log back in. If the navigation items are not displayed, edit and save (but do not change) the role for the current user account. The menu items appear the next time that the page is refreshed.
When you add a collector in a Cisco or Avaya environment, a few identifying items are not displayed immediately, such as the collector version and available license values.
Workaround: Click the Update Status button and then reload the collector.
During our tests of calls that passed through an Avaya voice gateway, we saw that maximum jitter values in the Call Watch Details report were lower than the average jitter values. After some investigation, we reported this issue to Avaya.
In our testing, we occasionally observed abnormally high values for jitter buffer loss. We determined that the spike occurs when there is a mismatch in voice activity detection settings between the call server and the gateway. During silence in the conversation, the phone interprets zero received packets as 100 percent concealment, which is then factored into the jitter buffer loss total.
Not all Microsoft endpoints that send end-of-call quality reports identify the payload for the inbound call stream. UC Monitor can identify the codec for an inbound stream only when one of the two conversing parties reports the necessary payload information.
The Cisco Unified Personal Communicator sometimes uses the same RTP port for calls. Therefore, if successive gateway calls are made to or from the same CUPC within 5 minutes, UC Monitor may not correlate the call quality statistics correctly.
The default setting in report views is to refresh the browser window every 60 seconds so that new collected data is reflected in the charts. The refresh can be troublesome because it also scrolls the page back to the top.
Workaround: Use the OPTIONS menu on the report page to disable auto-refresh. Then press F5 to refresh the page every few minutes.
When a monitored call is too short to contain enough data for every call quality metric, the call can appear in reports with only a MOS value.
Workaround: Do not try to analyze data from calls with a duration of less than 30 seconds.
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