Empowering Unified Communications
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BrochureUnified Communications, including Cisco IP Telephony and Telepresence, during new
deployments, upgrades, and ongoing operations. UC Xpert maximizes performance and availability through automated proactive testing, performance monitoring, configuration management, and business intelligence reporting.
UC Xpert: Four Pillars that Empower Unified Communications
- Automated Proactive Testing
- Automatically tests all the functionality that end users rely upon to get their job done.
- Provides troubleshooting and remote phone control applications that allow support personnel to reduce the mean time to repair (MTTR) issues.
- Performance Monitoring
- Monitors and alerts on problems in voice quality, service availability, performance, security, capacity and other key performance metrics.
- Configuration Management
- Tracks configuration change as they occur.
- Routinely discovers data to populate a CMDB.
- Automates inventory change reports.
- Monitors registration status changes.
- Business Intelligence
- Provides dashboards, reporting and analytics of inventory, tests and other metrics to reduce outages, and manage costs.
Automated Proactive Testing
If you haven’t tested it, it’s probably broken. With a mission critical application such as Cisco VoIP and Unified Communications, it is imperative to test the functionality after deployment, following upgrades, and during off-hours when problems may go undetected. Additionally, in a multi-site environment, the ability to remotely troubleshoot and diagnose detected problems is a critical component to scaling your voice IT team.
UC Xpert takes control of individual phones, and automatically runs each phone through a battery of tests that mimic the everyday use of business users. In doing so, UC Xpert tests all call paths, network components, gateways, configurations, and even the phone itself. If a phone passes UC Xpert testing, you can be confident it will be ready when your critical business users arrive each day.
Benefits of Automated Proactive Testing
- Agentless, utilizes deployed IP Phones
- Replaces costly, ineffective manual testing
- Standardizes testing processes
- Identifies issues for resolution before they impact users
Automated Proactive Testing enables enterprises to have greater confidence in the quality of the Cisco Unified Communications system, accelerate deployments, and increase end user acceptance. UC Xpert Automated Testing is perfect for new deployments or regression testing after additional deployment, scheduled maintenance, upgrades or migrations.
UC Xpert also include capabilities for troubleshooting and remote phone control, allowing you to quickly isolate and resolve end user issues without dispatching your IT staff to remote sites, thus reducing mean time to repair.
Help Desk
End user problems will inevitably exist due to various reasons ranging from feature usage to actual device or call routing failures. Rather than allowing these issues to be escalated to Tier 3 support as a standard practice, UC Xpert Help Desk empowers Tier 1 and 2 responders to become more effective. Benefits include:
Empower Tier 1 and 2 Responders to be More Effective
- Increase End User Confidence
- Eliminate or reduce end user involvement during troubleshooting
- Reduction or elimination of voice issue ticket escalation
- Standardization of support process, capture information, troubleshooting steps
- Multi-Cluster Search
- Search by Directory Number or Description
- Bookmark phones for easy retrieval
- Configuration Management
- Current configuration collected from CUCM
- Comprehensive Phone and Directory Number configurations
- Configuration Comparison to previous configuration
- Configuration Comparison to "Known Good" Reference Phone
- Comparison configuration easily copied to Trouble Ticket.
UC Xpert Troubleshooting provides real-time views of individual phone settings, status, line setting and recent call history, allowing voice engineers at all levels to isolate and fix end user issues faster.
Capture Critical Device Information
- Phone/line settings, network status, and recent user call history including MOS and disconnect codes
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- Compare Phones in Real Time
- Dependency - Track Changes must be enabled for CCM Sync
- Provides only Sync where changes are detected
- Comparison of all elements included in Help Desk
- Reference Phones
- Select a specific phone with "Known Good" Configuration
- Bookmark Reference Phones for easy retrieval
Remote Hands
At times, it is not possible for support staff to completely assess a user's problem without accessing the phone itself. UCXpert offers remote phone control capabilities through its Remote Hands feature that enables first hand observation of user issues including troubleshooting and verifying fixes remotely, all without the need to involve the end user. This approach saves a tremendous amount of time for both the support engineer and end user alike and allows after-hours troubleshooting to occur.
Troubleshoot & Verify Fixes Remotely without the Need to Involve the End User
- Enables remote control of all features/functions of IP Deskphones
- Real-time phone screen display/refresh
Key Features
- Visibility into End Users use of phone
- Control of phone for problem replication
- Place test calls during Problem Isolation phase
- Test after fix has been applied
- Close trouble ticket and report back to user with confidence
Support staff can view or control an end user phone from a centralized location, allowing for problem replication and troubleshooting as well as verification of problem resolution.
Remote Phone Control
Performance Monitoring
Performance Monitoring Dashboard allows users to monitor performance, service availability and device registration. All dashboard elements can be used in alert rules to provide 7/24 monitoring of voice services and infrastructure.
Alerting & Notifications
UC Xpert Performance Monitoring allows enterprises with Cisco VoIP to monitor for optimized voice performance including voice quality, voice service availability, server health, gateway capacity, and device registration. Performance monitoring allows enterprises to monitor Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and define alerts to isolate and resolve issues before they impact end users.
Enterprises can proactively manage Cisco Unified Communications health to prevent large-scale outages or unplanned downtime:
- Decrease reaction time and mean time to repair
- Detect a wide range of conditions such as:
- Server performance degradation
- Trunk capacity thresholds
- Device registration events
- Call setup failures
- Poor Voice Quality calls
- Fraud or suspicious calls
- Enhance security monitoring to detect toll fraud and malicious calls
Utilizing an easy to set-up, easy to maintain user interface that reduce total cost of ownership:
- Agent-less, 24x7 monitoring of the health of multiple Cisco Unified CM Clusters
- User defined policies and rules for system performance thresholds
- Flexible alerting capabilities tied to each policy
Alert examples include:
- Poor Voice Quality
- Low or No Bandwidth
- Emergency Call Activity
- Executive User Issues
- Gateway Low Call Volume
- Incorrect Call Routing
- Malicious Calling
- Service Unavailable
- Suspicious Call Activity
Real-Time Performance Dashboard
UC Xpert exposes real-time performance metrics through a rich, interactive Dashboard allowing users to view trends and analyze capacity and threshold violations. A playback capability allows users to view historical data to help determine root causes and identify temporary conditions. The UC Xpert Performance Dashboard includes the following metrics:
- Device Registration
- Percent devices change status by Device Pool
- All device types (gateways, phones, CTI Route Points, Voice Mail ports, Gatekeepers)
- CUCM failover alerting
- Server Health
- Server Performance (CPU, Memory, Storage, NIC)
- Services state change (restarts, unexpected crashes or starts)
- Call Process
- Route Group/List or gateway call activity
- MGCP PRI channel status
- MGCP FXO/FXS port status
- Media Resource
- All types (MOH, MTP,Transcoders, Annunciators, Conf Bridges)
- Unexpected decrease in available resources
Configuration Management
Day-to-day configuration changes are unavoidable. End user needs, voice capacity and applications evolve constantly. Changing configuration elements within your Cisco Unified Communication Manager (Cisco CallManager) can have a dramatic and immediate effect on your Voice over IP (VoIP) services. As a result, enterprises are often wary of making major changes as they have had no standardized way to test the functionality of the system afterwards. Indeed, major upgrades to Cisco Unified Communications Manager (such as version 4.x to version 6, 7 or 8) are often delayed because of the uncertainty of what settings may change during the upgrade process itself.
Configuration Management capabilities available in UC Xpert provide needed visibility into both current configurations as well as changes made to the system. Using UC Xpert testing, enterprises have always had the ability to validate the new functionality as soon as changes have been made. With UC Xpert Configuration Management, users have the added benefit of detecting both authorized and unauthorized changes to nearly every configuration element. If necessary, users can rollback only those changes which introduce problems.
Configuration Analysis
View summary and system level configuration views, change trends over time, distribution breakdown by change type, and detailed listing to help determine root cause and reduce troubleshooting time.
Enhanced Change Alerting
All configuration elements tracked in the system can now be viewed through reports, the Configuration Dashboard, and monitored for changes. Alerting can be customized to track adds, removes or updates, and exclude any set of commonly changed attributes. Notifications sent via email and/or SNMP traps.
Scheduled Updates to the Configuration Management Database (CMDB)
Users can choose when to update the CMDB through scheduled tasks.
Change Tracking Technology
UC Xpert provides in depth tracking of nearly all changes made to Cisco Unified Communications Manager and Cisco Unity messaging. Unlike other products which focus simply on added or removed phones, UC Xpert takes change tracking to a new level to track add, remove, and updates to all configuration elements and their attributes. By tracking these changes, users can quickly identify the root cause of problems introduced through configuration changes.
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Business Intelligence
UC Xpert Business Intelligence involves the collection, analysis, and presentation of data allowing voice engineers to make informed decisions and predictions about the availability of the voice service to their end users. UC Xpert is in a unique position to be able to present views into the health of the voice system by collecting raw data from many disparate sources in your Cisco Unified Communications Manager environment, from Call Detail Records, Key Performance Indicators, Configurations, and integrating them into actionable, consumable business reports and views.
Business Analysis Reports
- Call Statistics: Analyze call handling behavior of a designated group of users with metrics such as:
- Average Time to Answer
- Number Calls Forwarded
- Average Call Duration
- Total Calls Received/Placed
- Under Utilized Phones: Identify phones which have not been used to either make or receive calls within a specified timeframe
- Call Volume: Graphically view calls generated over time or to specific types of destinations (international, toll free, etc).
- Call Usage: View top N user’s call behaviors (made, received, total duration)
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