Digital Experience Monitoring for Vonage Voice Users with NetBeez

To continue our series on VoIP digital experience monitoring, we’ll talk about how to monitor Vonage user network performance. Vonage performance is critical for voice and video quality. For reference, we’ve already covered the same topic for Twilio, NICE, Genesys, RingCentral, Five9, 8×8, MS Teams, Zoom

Vonage Setup

Like most VoIP providers, Vonage offers an internal guide to help customers set up their network. This ensures the network meets requirements for bandwidth, latency, reliability, and security. These needs can vary greatly between branch offices. The deployment phase focuses on providing call center agents with the right infrastructure. This helps minimize voice and video quality issues. Below is an example diagram from Vonage’s guide for a small office setup:

Vonage architecture

Source: https://businesssupport.vonage.com/articles/Answer/Networking-Guidelines-993

Vonage Troubleshooting

Troubleshooting and support are inevitable, even with the best initial setup and configuration. Addressing network quality issues becomes more critical when call center agents work remotely. At home, agents rely on consumer routers and ISPs, often in environments prone to poor network performance.

If a remote agent experiences VoIP issues, they may contact their IT support team for help. Vonage provides tools and guidelines for assessing network connections. Like other VoIP providers, this requires the agent to manually run the test and report the results to their IT team.

Here is now the Vonage network assessment tool works:

  1. The user goes to this URL and inputs the testing parameters shown below:
Vonage assessment
  1. The user starts the assessment, and a minute or so later is presented with the following results:
Vonage test results
  1. The user can assess themselves the quality of the network connection based on the following table:
Vonage measurement metrics
  1. The user might be asked to share the results with their IT support team for further evaluation and troubleshooting

This approach is functional, but has certain limitations:

  1. IT needs to reach the user to run this test, and communicate the results back which is cumbersome and time consuming
  2. It’s a muti-step manual process that can help capture the user’s network performance at a specific point in time 
  3. It’s not continuous in order to capture the user experience 24/7
  4. t doesn’t keep any historical to create baselines for anomaly detention and reporting

NetBeez Vonage Troubleshooting

The Vonage assessment tool uses a cloud server (ec2-44-225-108-59.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com) to perform latency, jitter, packet loss and  bandwidth assessment. NetBeez can use the same server to measure those metrics in an automated way, running continuously and building performance baselines.

The first step in the process is to install the NetBeez endpoint  on the agent’s laptop. This is something that is done once. It’s usually orchestrated through a remote management tool such as InTune or SCCM.

Once that is done, IT can manage the testing on each endpoint through the dashboard, and also collect and analyze the network performance metrics collected without needing to involve the agent. 

Below is the NetBeez dashboard running a latency test to the Vonage test server, calculating the jitter, packet loss and MOS score:

NetBeez vonage tests

Similarly to latency, the Vonage troubleshooting server maintains a TCP iPerf version 2 server on port 5060 that can be used for bandwidth testing. Setting up a continuous iPerf test is easy and the historical results look like this:

We can see that while the tests are running (the gaps in the plot correspond to the laptop’s sleep times) the user was able to sustain around 9Mbps of bandwidth to the Vonage test server.

In  addition to latency and bandwidth, we can also run continuous Path Analysis that breaks down the path of the user’s traffic flow from their laptop to the Vonage testing server. This gives us hop-by-hop information that includes hop IP, ASN name and number, and node statistics:

Path analysis

Proactive Monitoring

As you can see with NetBeez you can run similar tests to the ones used by the Vonage native troubleshooting tool, but in a continuous fashion. This establishes historical information which can be used to set up alerting that can help you identify user experience issues proactively. As an example, the following alert template will be triggered when a user’s packet loss goes above 1%:

Packet loss alert in NetBeez

As soon as the IT team receives the alert, they can look at the user’s historical information to understand when the issue started. If it’s consistent or intermittent, and whether the user is on WiFi or plugged in. Based on that they can advise the user to address their issue in order to avoid any dropped or poor quality calls.

As an example, today I am experiencing videoconferencing issues and this is the graph from the agent running on my laptop:

As you can see, the packet loss is away above acceptable levels, and that is reflected in the choppy MOS score. NetBeez triggered an alert because the packet loss went about the 1% value (see table above), which is prohibitive for good quality videoconference experience.

Conclusions

Vonage’s native network assessment tool offers basic testing capabilities. NetBeez enhances this with a 24/7 automated monitoring solution. It maintains historical data and enables proactive alerts. This allows IT teams to identify and fix network issues before they affect call quality. Manual agent-initiated tests are no longer needed. NetBeez provides continuous visibility, detailed path analysis, and performance metrics. These tools help organizations deliver high-quality VoIP experiences. Call center agents benefit from this, whether working remotely or in the office.

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