Vodia introduces call diagnostics feature for quality of service

WOBURN, MA. – Nov. 19, 2013  – Vodia Networks Inc  announced today a new diagnostics feature for its IP-PBX product line and hostedi.am cloud service. The new feature allows administrators to capture call and audio data directly on the PBX for diagnostics, without the need for any external packet capture tools.

As more and more deployments move to the cloud, there appears to be an increased need to troubleshoot media and quality of service related issues. This is largely due to the fact that with internet based deployments, quality of service is not the same as with Local Area Networks, and thus cannot be guaranteed in call cases. Although QoS statistics gathering techniques such as RTCP-XR have been around for many years, such statistics only provide a superficial overview on how users may perceive the overall quality, making  RTCP-XR reports insufficient for assessing and analysing quality of service in real life environments.

Running packet capture tools such as Wireshark or Ethereal directly on the system has been the de facto approach for tracking quality related issues for some time now. However with the advent of hosted environments that involve hundreds of registrations and a large number of concurrent calls, the packet capture files generated by such tools can tend to be humongous in size and thus impractical to use. What is even worse, finding the right call in the captured data is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Studies indicate that in most cases, complaints about call quality affect a certain extension or a certain SIP trunk on the phone system. Keeping this in mind, the Vodia PBX allows administrators to record packet captures for calls based on the trunk or based on a specific extension. Each call generates a separate packet capture (PCAP) file; if there are multiple calls that match the capturing criteria, the PBX creates several files accordingly to the criteria. Another great aspect of the Vodia PBX’s packet capture feature is its ability to record TLS and SRTP traffic. Analysing TLS or SRTP encrypted traffic with tools such as Wireshark is difficult by nature, because the data is encrypted before it is placed on the wire. Since the PBX maintains the security context for both the signalling and the media streams, it first decodes the traffic and then sends it to the packet capture subsystem which can be viewed in clear text.

Some of the great benefits of Vodia’s call diagnostics feature include:

• Eliminates the need to install any external packet capture tool for diagnostics – packet capture can be performed directly from within the PBX admin interface
• Eases out the tracking of bugs and quality issues
• Provides the ability to analyze encrypted media to measure quality of service in secure environments

For further details about Vodia’s call diagnostics feature please visit http://www.vodia.com  or contact sales@vodia.com.

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