Adding Voice Gateways and Other Media Devices › Why Add Other Media Devices?

Why Add Other Media Devices?

A unified communications deployment can include many different devices, from various vendors, to support voice and video calls, conferencing, and voice mail. UC Monitor discovers these devices when calls pass through them. You can also manually add devices to the Other Devices category.

The Other Devices category includes the following types of devices:

• Microsoft mediation servers, edge servers, conferencing servers, and unified messaging servers.

  UC Monitor monitors the performance of the call legs that Microsoft devices handle. Both VoIP and video call performance metrics from these call legs are included in the media device views in UC Monitor performance reports. SNMP is not used to contact these servers, therefore:

  • Baseline traceroute data is not available.
  • The servers are not included in performance threshold configuration.
• Devices that do not contribute to call performance reporting, such as unsupported types of voice gateways. You can manually add these devices so that they are included in a device inventory, for example.
• Devices that you want to monitor individually, although they are part of a larger group. For example: You configure a Location that includes the servers that support your high-end video conferencing system, such as Cisco TelePresence or Polycom PVX.

  However, a defined Location provides granularity only to the subnet level in reports. Reports correlate calls to a Location and subnet, but not to the individual servers in that subnet. If you define the video conferencing devices as Other Devices, UC Monitor reports can easily associate video conference calls to their respective devices.