As enterprise IP telephony adoption continues to snowball, IT people on the front lines are talking about the difficulties in troubleshooting these systems. The learning curve is pretty substantial as the technology continues to evolve quickly. Unfortunately, today’s systems monitoring / alerting tools aren’t really capable of detecting the hardest problems. As Chris Celiberti, Director of Advanced Services at NeuStar, recently told me:“A lot of this VoIP technology is still so brand new – there’s tremendous amounts of learning required to configure it properly and use software and equipment the way it’s supposed to be used. Just in the original configuration, you can wind up blocking calls by accident if you don’t know what you’re doing. There are major integration issues. Each vendor’s equipment can be using different versions of the same protocol like SIP. Avaya equipment using SIP can look different than Nortel equipment using SIP or Cisco’s own implentation. To get things to communicate properly, there’s a lot of integration work that needs to be done – and integration services in fact are a big revenue stream for the IP telephony vendors. With VoIP systems, there are many different network elements that must work together to delivery a call. Remember the standards of PSTN systems? That was a world that evolved over decades, but IP telephony is much newer and still experiencing plenty of growing pains. When something breaks down, you’d think your network management systems would inform you, but for a lot of enterprises and vendors this is all still new. In the old PSTN world, you have data rich MIBs that are very well defined. When a PSTN system fails you know it pretty fast. But for IP telephony systems to work properly, MIBs have to be designed to properly understand the new network elements, and of today’s network monitoring tools aren’t necessarily designed yet to find every break-down.”Do you have an IP Telephony troubleshooting trick or tip you’d like to share or just get off your chest? Beat away and email me at: thebaum@splunk.com. Technology Industry