In an effort to help customers more easily manage their voice networks, NetQoS is pumping up its Performance Center product with capabilities to measure voice call quality, traffic volume and response times, among other things.

The company last spring introduced its NetQoS Performance Center (NPC), which is software that enables customers using more than one of its products (SuperAgent, ReporterAnalyzer and NetVoyant) to tap data and reports from a single portal interface.

The company says NPC provides visibility, via a Web console, into three key capabilities to quantify network infrastructure performance: end-to-end performance monitoring, traffic analysis, and device performance monitoring. Performance Center is a software script that NetQoS customers can install on a server running its software or on a separate dedicated server. The script uses Web services to present data collected by NetQoS products in a Web-based management interface.

Next week, the company will add features to monitor voice calls for quality metrics such as latency, jitter, packet loss and mean opinion score (MOS). The new version can also determine the volume of VoIP traffic across the WAN, including details such as who is using it and when, NetQoS says, to ensure voice traffic isn't negatively affecting other applications. NPC can also help network managers measure response times with data and alerts on application behavior changes due to VoIP bandwidth consumption, as well as make decisions on call manager deployment and upgrades with "passive response time monitoring for call signaling/setup protocols," NetQoS says.

"We can show on one page the volume of voice traffic, the impact of voice to your applications and the performance of, say, Cisco CallManager," says Steve Fulton, director of product management at NetQoS.

NetQoS Performance Center is being offered to customers and is included with other NetQoS products at no additional cost. The new VoIP features will be available June 19.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.