TouchStone Technologies is spot-on with VoIP monitoring

The first fundamental requirement of any VoIP analysis and troubleshooting tool is that it report accurate information while monitoring a network. The four basic measurements — voice quality, latency, packet loss and jitter — are key metrics that must be assessed accurately and in real time. The key differentiator in this round of testing was the accuracy of the tools in measuring these four metrics.

The second fundamental requirement of any VoIP analysis and troubleshooting tool is usability. If it is difficult to set up, if the configuration challenges even experienced VoIP engineers, if it cannot be configured to scale with the environment it is designed to monitor, the requirement for accuracy doesn’t really matter.

Touchstone's WinEyeQ came out on top in our testing based on how well it nailed these two fundamentals. WinEyeQ has a clean, intuitive interface that is very effective whether it's watching one call or thousands. There are no worries about IT administrators or other computer-savvy operators not being able to deploy and use this product.

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The first fundamental requirement of any VoIP analysis and troubleshooting tool is that it report accurate information while monitoring a network. The four basic measurements — voice quality, latency, packet loss and jitter — are key metrics that must be assessed accurately and in real time. The key differentiator in this round of testing was the accuracy of the tools in measuring these four metrics.

The second fundamental requirement of any VoIP analysis and troubleshooting tool is usability. If it is difficult to set up, if the configuration challenges even experienced VoIP engineers, if it cannot be configured to scale with the environment it is designed to monitor, the requirement for accuracy doesn’t really matter.

Touchstone's WinEyeQ came out on top in our testing based on how well it nailed these two fundamentals. WinEyeQ has a clean, intuitive interface that is very effective whether it's watching one call or thousands. There are no worries about IT administrators or other computer-savvy operators not being able to deploy and use this product.

As for accuracy, WinEyeQ also provided the most precise voice-quality and network-operations statistics of all the products tested; it came closest in pinpointing actual MOS, R-factor and jitter conditions. WinEyeQ was always within 0.1 of the "actual" MOS rating for voice quality, and within 10% for jitter and latency measurements. It did so on the first attempt, whereas most of the other products required extensive tuning to detect our network's problems accurately. WildPackets' OmniPeek Enterprise was the closest to WinEyeQ's benchmark, coming within 0.2 of the rated MOS expected, but it was not consistently accurate.

Ten of the 24 network-troubleshooting tasks we challenged the vendors to detect and react to depended on measuring voice quality. All of the products tested could detect these problems and were capable of assessing voice quality, but WinEyeQ's greater accuracy in measuring made for more accurate reporting of events, and alarms and fewer false-positive notifications when it assessed the network. This is important not only when it comes to finding problems but also in terms of preventing unnecessary work on the part of a VoIP administrator. If a VoIP analysis tool inaccurately senses a problem — perhaps too much jitter — it can trigger a domino effect of other false alarms.

We believe WinEyeQ's spot-on performance has much to do with the fact that it was designed from the ground up as a VoIP analysis and monitoring tool.

Despite its ability to hit even the tiniest VoIP-network detail squarely on the head, when it comes to identifying the problems to which those details correlate, WinEyeQ's interface design is clean and simple. There's some unnecessary glitz, but it provides everything you need to dig down in to do packet-level analysis for VoIP and video transmissions in order to isolate, verify and troubleshoot a problem. The interface's efficiency, organizational structure and consistency are a notable improvement from the last time we tested this product.