A large global financial services group was having problems with their Avaya UC VoIP solution running on a Cisco data network. As soon as they deployed a tool from Avaya Support, they quickly identified Quality of Service issues at three major sites globally: routers were miss configured and were not preserving the DSCP QoS tagging.
That’s right − an Avaya tool quickly identified a miss configuration with Cisco routers in a global network. The tool is the SLA Mon TM Server, part of the Avaya Diagnostic Server, it’s free, and I think you should be using it.
In-House Innovation:
On a snowy, Denver day in March 2010, one of the Research Scientists from Avaya Labs, Jean Meloche, presented a prototype did performance monitoring of data networks with code embedded into the firmware of our phones.
We immediately saw this as a big value-add for our support customers as customer-provided data network performance is crucial to proper operation of Avaya applications.
Under the guidance of Jean, the Avaya Client Services’ own R&D organization brought this prototype to market with patented technologies, launching SLA Mon TM in 2013. While there are third party vendors that offer similar capabilities in the market, SLA Mon™ is differentiated in two ways:
We leverage the Avaya phones already spread throughout the customer network, instead of requiring new monitoring hardware or software to be deployed. SLA Mon TM is a free entitlement to our customers with Support Advantage Preferred coverage on their Aura CM, or with support on Avaya Networking solutions.
Imagine that an end-user reports poor audio quality on a phone call at 3 p.m. a few days ago. The IT department uses SLA Mon TM to see how the data network was operating over that link at that time frame and notices significant jitter.
The engineer has a hunch it was due to load, so she uses SLA Mon TM to remotely control 50 phones, placing real phone calls on the network, while remotely doing a packet trace directly on the phones in question. With real-time confirmation that the jitter returned and the packet captures matching, she knows she has root cause. All that … without leaving her desk.
Creating Value in Support:
This free application has many more capabilities than covered in the use case above, but hopefully I’ve given you a glimpse into how a tool like this can add real value to any VoIP customer.
There is a reason that Avaya doesn’t sell this application separately: we saw it as being very valuable in keeping our products running well and troubleshooting issues that came up, and so we bundled it into our Support Advantage Preferred coverage.
We know that Proactive Support − gathering data to avoid major outages − is key to our customers’ satisfaction. Simply, it’s how support coverage creates real value in an enterprise.
By enabling our customers with tools like this, Avaya Support is leading the industry in support delivery. Furthermore, if the customer needs more assistance with an issue, the supporting party (Avaya or an Authorized Business Partner) can access the tool via SAL to quickly get to the root cause.
