Beware of multiple IT teams and 'finger pointing' in unified comms problems, advises NetScout

"Holistic approach" required, says vendor

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Multiple groups managing unified communications in siloes can lead to disaster, network monitoring firm NetScout has warned.

"Turning to the broader enterprise network objectives to deliver high quality voice and video, as well as data application services" presents "a great challenge," NetScout says.

"The challenge for IT teams today is that most organisations have multiple groups within the department that are responsible for specific voice, video and business data components or applications in the enterprise environment," says NetScout.

"These teams work with various monitoring and diagnostics tools that are specific to a particular application or component in the IT environment."

But standalone tools, says NetScout, provide "inconsistent" analysus data, that's often "proprietary or otherwise incompatible", and that can't be easily integrated or easily correlated with other compononents, systems or applications in a company.

"The lack of holistic service visibility and collaboration produces an inefficient, iterative process for triage and root cause analysis of UC&C performance issues."

NetScout posits a direct example of the sort of chaos it says can ensue from disparate teams managing so many different elements of communications.

"When a user reports an incident to the help desk, the help desk technician first creates a ticket, logs the incident details, verifies that the problem exists, and performs basic root cause analysis and troubleshooting," says NetScout.

"If the technician can't quickly resolve the issue, the issue is escalated to another team. However, determining the correct team to escalate the issue to can be a challenge in and of itself. Is it a desktop issue? Networking? Server? Application? Database? Third-party session initiation protocol (SIP) trunking, or wide area network (WAN) provider? Or some other UC component?"

With geographical dispersion, NetScout continues, there may (ironically) need to be even more conference calls to get the right people ‘in the room' to solve a problem.

To avoid "throwing the problem over the wall", NetScout recommends IT teams have a "holistic UC&C performance management solution" that is "vendor agnostic, intuitive and actionable, and provides real-time end-to-end visibility of the entire user experience and IT environment".

"These tools must be available to all IT teams so that all groups have a consistent version of "the truth" and can work together in a collaborative and effective manner," NetScout concludes.