Documentation forVoIP & Network Quality Manager
Monitoring VoIP and network quality is a key capability of Hybrid Cloud Observability and is also available in a standalone module, VoIP & Network Quality Manager (VNQM). Hybrid Cloud Observability and VNQM are built on the self-hosted SolarWinds Platform.

What is Network Service Assurance monitoring?

Network Service Assurance is a diagnostic method that generates and analyzes traffic between Cisco IOS and Juniper RPM devices on your network. By using SolarWinds VNQM to implement Network Service Assurance operations between your network devices, you can acquire real-time and historical statistics that give you accurate Quality of Service (QoS) measurements over designated network paths. Network Service Assurance provides baseline information about network performance, and help you identify the root cause of a problem if performance levels drop. Network Service Assurance is especially useful for WANs that connect multiple locations but need to be monitored from one central location.

The following diagram illustrates how Network Service Assurance monitoring works.

Source: A device that creates and inserts Network Service Assurance packets into the network. The source is where all Network Service Assurance operation tests are initiated.

Target: The ultimate destination of the packets created and sent by the source.

Operation: The type of test being performed on the network.

Supported operations

When you define an operation, the Source device continuously sends tests to the target, running the test every five minutes by default. The Cisco or Juniper device stores the operation results in its memory, and SolarWinds VNQM polls the results through SNMP and CLI parsing. Network Service Assurance use active traffic-monitoring to continuously monitor traffic across the network. SolarWinds VNQM supports the following operations:

  • DHCP: measures the response time taken to discover a DHCP server, and then obtain a leased IP address from it.
  • DNS: measures the difference in time from when a DNS request is sent and when the reply is received.
  • FTP: measures the response time between a Cisco device and an FTP server to retrieve a file.
  • HTTP: measures distributed web services response times.
  • ICMP Echo: measures round trip time between nodes on the network.
  • ICMP Path Echo: measures round trip time hop-by-hop between nodes on the network.
  • ICMP Path Jitter: measures WAN quality by testing connection times hop-by-hop between two devices.
  • TCP Connect: measures WAN quality by testing connection times between two devices using a specific port.
  • UDP Echo: measures round trip time between nodes on the network.
  • UDP Jitter: measures WAN quality by testing connection times between two devices using a specific port number.
  • VoIP UDP Jitter: measures call path metrics on the VoIP network.

This getting started guide shows you how to add a VoIP UDP Jitter operation to SolarWinds VNQM. For all other operations, see the SolarWinds VNQM Administrator Guide.