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ATSG for Cisco Unified Communications (UC)
Ensure Your Cisco UC Solution Keeps Your Employees Connected
Cisco Unified Communications (UC) enables your employees to collaborate seamlessly in real time across geographies and devices. Such functionality is vital for modern businesses whose employees may work from the office, the road or the home. Without it, employees become disconnected and productivity plummets.
Given its impact on employee productivity, it is essential that your Cisco UC solution operates at peak performance. Dropped calls, poor voice or video quality, and other issues that hinder your employees’ ability to collaborate must be avoided.
Keep your employees connected by assuring the performance and availability of your Cisco UC deployment with Cisco Unified Communications monitoring and optional managed services from ATSG.
What is Cisco Unified Communications?
Cisco Unified Communications solutions deliver integrated voice, video, mobility, presence services and more across endpoints, devices and applications. Environments comprised of so many varied and distributed technologies are technically complex and thereby difficult to manage.
A Cisco UC Success Story
When one of Europe’s largest FinTech companies grew dissatisfied with its managed service provider, they brought in ATSG to address their network performance and availability issues. At go-live, over 3,800 endpoints, 16 Cisco UC servers and 28 Cisco UCCE servers – along with supporting network infrastructure – were under management by ATSG.
99.8% reduction in incident
volume driven by the
OPTXTM Platform
93% of incidents proactively
detected by OPTXTM
Platform without customer
having to report a service issue
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ATSG has over three
million total endpoints
under management
ATSG holds a Cisco
Advanced Collaboration
Architecture
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ATSG is a Cisco
Preferred Solution
Partner for monitoring
of UC deployments
100% of L2 and L3
engineers in the ATSG
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Erase Resolution Times With Cisco UC Monitoring Software
Cisco Unified Communications relies on many different components. Any problems with the network, servers, business applications, communications media, endpoints or consumer applications that are part of the Cisco UC system will cause performance degradations or outages. In turn, those degradations and outages will hinder employee collaboration and productivity.
Whenever part of your Cisco UC system is experiencing issues, it is critical to fix the offending issues quickly, and even better to avoid them altogether. But with the disparate point tools commonly used to manage various Cisco UC components, it is difficult and time consuming to troubleshoot issues and nearly impossible to predict them.
Achieve predictive and proactive service assurance across the entire infrastructure stack supporting your Cisco UC deployment with the OPTXTM Platform. The platform delivers actionable intelligence for prioritizing and addressing problems before they impact your critical Cisco UC services to improve employee productivity and reduce IT costs.
The ATSG OPTXTM Platform for Cisco Unified Communications
The OPTXTM Platform has been purpose-built to monitor and manage Cisco UC by Cisco experts – including several CCIEs – and has achieved Cisco Compatible certification for UC deployments. It helps you achieve unprecedented performance and availability for Cisco UC deployments by combining its innovative core capabilities with UC-specific features and functionality typically only found in point tools.
Auto-Discovery
Full-Stack Monitoring
Call Quality Dashboard
Troubleshoot call quality issues in real time versus attempting to do so after a call is over via access to centralized, real-time collaboration statistics and interactive intra-call statistics based on endpoint data. The ATSG OPTXTM Platform’s call quality dashboard provides access to network statistics as well as audio, video and presentation data that can be leveraged to determine if call quality issues are related to technology or user error.
In addition to real-time data, the dashboard provides easy access to historical CDR/CMR data such as:
- Number of calls
- Jitter
- Latency
- Packet loss
- Mean opinion score (MOS)
Finally, the dashboard also includes information on resource constraints which enable you to quickly identify configuration issues and capacity problems.
Collaboration Quality Dashboard
Enhance your ability to resolve Cisco UC issues that negatively impact user experience with location-based reporting capabilities. Through the ATSG OPTXTM Platform’s collaboration quality dashboard, you are able to see which locations in your network are communicating with one another and track relevant statistics on their interactions.
In one real-world example, a large, distributed enterprise was receiving complaints about poor telepresence experience from executives, but only when those executives were communicating directly with a specific conference room. The problem was easily tracked down by analyzing location-based data in the collaboration quality dashboard. It did not otherwise show up as a problem since such calls were infrequent and buried amongst hundreds of thousands of other calls.
Call Test Tool
Gain a clear understanding of the source of Cisco UC performance and availability issues so that you can more efficiently and effectively resolve them with the ATSG OPTXTM Platform’s call test tool. The tool works by conducting synthetic transactions in which logical phones call each other on a regular basis. This allows call paths and other relevant elements to be checked.
Since calls are controlled by humans, it can be hard to determine if short calls, connection failures and other problems are caused by technology or human activity (e.g., because someone placed a call then immediately hung up). Such problems can also be brought on by outside forces, like a call quality issue caused by environmental background noise. Synthetic transactions enhance your ability to troubleshoot these problems as they eliminate the unknown quantity of unpredictable human tendencies from the equation.
Trunk Traffic Reports
Gain easy access to capacity data on physical and logical resources such as SIP trunks via the ATSG OPTXTM Platform’s trunk traffic reports. This data be compared against errors, such as media resource exhausted alerts, that trigger even though the trunk may only be running at 30% capacity. In such cases, the platform allows further troubleshooting to be conducted to determine if the problem is being caused by a segmentation and policy configuration error or if there is a device issue.
Trunk traffic reports also show the busiest times of the week and month, as well as peak loads. This information is important for capacity planning purposes as it can indicate if additional bandwidth is required or if a reduction that will decrease costs without sacrificing call quality is possible.
System Use and Misuse Dashboards
Determine how to best utilize Cisco UC technologies – and thus maximize the return on your investment in UC – with the aid of statistics on system use available in the ATSG OPTXTM Platform.
For example, the platform can indicate whether people are using telepresence rooms to communicate with different locations, or if they are using the equipment in those rooms as local displays for people meeting face to face. This information enables the company to make a decision on how to maximize their investment in telepresence equipment. They may opt to redeploy the equipment to a more useful location, or simply provide employees training on its proper use.
Core Capabilities
Eliminate the noise common in management deployments relying on multiple point tools with a platform that integrates UC-specific features with powerful core capabilities – such as Root Cause Analysis (RCA), Smart Analytics and Business Impact Monitoring (BIM) – to provide a best-of-breed solution.
Talk To Us About Your Cisco Unified Communications Needs.
Achieve Peak UC Performance With Cisco UC Managed Services
Cisco Unified Communications solutions deliver integration of a diverse array of collaboration tools: IP telephony for voice calling, web and video conferencing, voicemail, mobility, desktop sharing, instant messaging and presence, and more. To ensure seamless user experiences and real-time communications are possible across all these tools at all times, high levels of vigilance are required.
Unfortunately, at a time when enterprises expect their IT departments to focus primarily on strategic initiatives, giving undivided attention to IT operations management is not always a possibility. As a result, the performance and availability of Cisco UC solutions – and thus also the employee collaboration and productivity they enable – will suffer.
Direct internal resources toward high-value IT projects without sacrificing the performance of your Cisco UC solution by leveraging UC managed services from ATSG. Through the ATSG Managed Network Services (MNS), the UC experts in the ATSG NOC work to ensure your UC solution is operating at peak performance, freeing your employees to focus on facilitating innovation and driving revenue.