Aamer Ahkter, Technical Marketing Engineer from the Cisco Medianet team, recently led an hour-long webinar presentation hosted by ActionPacked! Networks, a Cisco Developer Network (CDN) registered partner. The title of the webinar presentation is “Optimizing Networks for Video, Voice, and Data.”
ActionPacked! Networks has posted the entire one-hour recording of the webinar on YouTube. Those wanting a more detailed overview of Cisco Medianet technologies from a leading Cisco SME should be sure to check out this excellent and insightful presentation.
The medianet team recently added a Cisco Medianet Playlist to the Cisco YouTube channel. The playlist archives videos produced by the medianet team over the last few years and will be updated as new videos are created.
Medianet is Cisco’s recommended best practice architecture for video and collaboration. Medianet simplifies and reduces the cost of deploying and managing video and collaboration applications, with features that help you perform faster troubleshooting and enhance the quality of user experience end- to-end. The videos in the playlist will help you learn more about Cisco Medianet features and technologies through general overview videos and technology demos.
In my previous blog, we looked at how Catalyst switches can be used to assess video application readiness in the network before rolling out a video based collaboration application. In this blog, let us take a look at available tools on the Catalyst switches to monitor and troubleshoot video problems in the network.
As we know, fundamentally, video traffic is different from data traffic. Video traffic is more dynamic and bandwidth intensive and even small changes in delay or loss can cause visible disruptions to user experience. Routinely, IT trouble tickets are opened by users that are faced with degraded video experience. To add to that, interactive video is real time. Any delay in troubleshooting will make IT miss the window to rectify the problem. For a firm with many locations and buildings, finding the problem can be complex and time consuming without the right tools.
In the coming weeks, Cisco will begin shipping the latest releases for the Cisco TelePresence endpoints, which has important implications for those customers looking to roll out a medianet-enabled infrastructure. With the new release, the Media Services Interface (MSI) will ship by default, enabling both the Media Monitoring and Media Awareness solutions for these endpoints. For network administrators, utilizing Media Monitoring in networks managed by Cisco Prime Collaboration Manager and other certified 3rd party management tools, it will now be possible to proactively monitor the network contribution to the end-user’s quality of experience. Being able to monitor key performance metrics (such as packet loss, jitter and delay) will enable network administrators to quickly identify if network service is adversely impacting experience and—in conjunction with Mediatrace—provide them with the ability to dynamically gather the end-to-end diagnostics needed for rapid problem resolution. Quite often, one of the biggest operational challenges with rich media conferencing is detecting and troubleshooting intermittent network quality issues. Often the end user has to complain to the IT department, the video administrator then tries to locate the problem, and by the time they engage the network administrator, the problem has disappeared. This leads to the two operations groups wasting hours trying to be at the right place at the right time to pick up their issues. With Performance Monitor now on both the network and on the endpoints, the operations team can proactively identify the issues and dynamically gather the necessary diagnostics as the problem occurs, rather than attempting to manually gather them after the problem has disappeared. With support in these high value applications, administrators can expect to reduce operational costs and maintain high levels of customer service. Read More »
NetFlow Analyzer leverages flow technologies to generate real-time traffic reports that help in getting visibility into the traffic patterns in the network. It provides:
On-demand mediatrace poll for instant monitoring
Threshold based alerts for key metrics
Highly granular reports with extensive storage options
