You’ll want to know the call signaling protocol your VoIP application uses, and be sure to capture all call-setup information.

There are four common call signaling protocols: H323, Cisco Skinny, SIP, and MGCP. This is helpful to know when applying filters and running reports in Observer®.

The most common problem with VoIP monitoring is failing to capture all the call-set up information. When this happens, Observer’s Expert Analysis can’t match up the RTP stream to the correct call, and won’t provide details on a per-call basis.

With complete setup info captured, go to VoIP Events under Expert Data, where Observer displays a summary of call metrics including jitter, packet loss, R-Factor and MOS scores. Clicking on the VoIP Events Call tab lists individual calls in a browsable tree. By clicking on the calls listed on the left side of the display, you can break each one down by direction and stream of RTP/RTCP packets.

Click on VoIP Events Expert within the Observer for more information.