| A lot of territory has been covered here, even after starting from the assumption that you already have excellent systems for managing your networks, users, and applications. Here are some highlights of the VoIP management recommendations introduced in this chapter: -
Maintain an up-to-date network inventory and topology diagram. -
Secure and back up critical files in your system, and establish strong access control policies on who can see, modify, or delete them. -
Provide redundancy for key existing services, such as DNS and DHCP, and monitor them continually. -
Provide redundancy to eliminate bottlenecks and single points of failure. For example, use highly reliable hardware, use high-speed CPUs, and supply lots of memory for the computers serving in the roles of IP PBX, VoIP server, or PSTN gateway. -
Implement a change control system to track configuration changes. -
Implement incident management to assist in isolating, fixing, and tracking problems. -
Deploy an IP address management plan, particularly as the number of IP phones increases. -
Monitor the operation of the hardware components within your VoIP equipment. Closely watch CPU, memory, and disk utilization. -
Monitor the software applications at the heart of your VoIP equipment. -
Monitor call quality across your entire range of components and locations. -
Monitor the completion of VoIP calls, such as how many calls are blocked or how many experience call setup problems. -
Set thresholds so that events are generated when performance declines and automated responses are taken when failures occur. -
Coordinate policy-based management within your overall performance management strategy. -
Connect the monitoring and event generation back into your central management console. The idea of SLAs was briefly introduced in this chapter, and will be explored in more detail in the next chapter. Issues such as typical SLAs for VoIP, what metrics should an SLA be based upon, and what penalties should be built in to your SLA will be addressed, as well as what you need to look for in an SLA from your service provider. |
