Intelligent Monitoring Engine offers best-ever UC support

For collaboration engineers and unified communications teams, the demands placed on them in the move to remote work has been akin to having a workload increase of 10 times or more overnight. As Nick Wiik, Vyopta’s senior manager of product management, describes it, work life in the world of UC support following the onset of Covid-19 has been harsh.

“The analogy I use is imagine being a sales rep and then overnight your quota got increased by 30x,” he said.

Managing that imbalance is one of the primary goals of Vyopta’s new Intelligent Monitoring Engine, a game-changing update to the company’s quality and usage monitoring technology that allows for highly customized, ongoing monitoring of an enterprise’s UC environment. With ability to create alerts for specific user groups, equipment usage or nearly any other scenario, Vyopta has answered a long-standing call from customers to provide the best possible flexibility in UC support for managing increasingly multivendor environments with thousands of remote users.

“It was by far and away the number one customer requested feature in both the quantity of requests, the magnitude of requests in terms of the number of customers asking for it,” Wiik said of the engine, which was released in mid-December. “the best way to help people improve their performance is to have a solution that’s constantly, around the clock monitoring the health of their environment. It’s proactively alerting them of issues and opportunities to improve their environment before issues come up.”

Three pillars of premiere UC support

Vyopta’s product team spent significant time and resources creating what is now the best-performing monitoring tool for remote collaboration and UC support, with three pillars of emphasis.

Granularity – This is the ability of the engine to track the most finely detailed inputs involved in remote video, voice and collaboration tools. This is a shift from most monitoring tools that lack the precision and allow teams charged with UC support to zero in on a specific set of endpoints instead of an organization’s entire stockpile of thousands.

As an example, it is possible to select only hardware and tools used by company VIPs or those used specifically in the delivery of telemedicine services, to ensure there are no quality problems associated with those units.

“We can now alert on anything in terms of the source, in terms of who’s making the calls, the peripherals of the call… it’s really the most comprehensive alerting engine in the industry,” Wiik said. “You look at what’s available in the collaboration industry, nothing’s even close.”

Customization – Robust monitoring creates vast amounts of data that can quickly overwhelm teams and make it difficult to keep track of the most important aspects of `quality and usage. That is why the Intelligent Monitoring Engine lets users create a menu of highly tailored alerts concerning the most important aspects of a company’s UC environment.

The custom builds allow the monitoring data to remain highly relevant and prevent needed information from getting lost in the noise.

And Wiik pointed to an example of some users tailoring alerts to keep tabs on a cloud providers’ habit of routing some calls through media nodes far outside the U.S. – in some cases through Mumbai in India – with a resulting loss in quality. With that data in their hands, the company was able to make sure the cloud provider routed their calls more efficiently, cutting down on quality problems as a result.

24/7 visibility – Intelligent Monitoring Engine users won’t have to worry about an important issue going undetected for hours. The consolidated real-time status of any customized query will be available at all hours, ensuring that if a room full of VIPs are experiencing a bad call the UC team will know quickly and be able to address the problem, or keep it from happening again.

“I can look at KPIs and upper level uses with my performance management tool that is now delivering the visibility on the very bespoke things that I care about and that I know will be relevant. I can see it all in real time. This really kind of transforms the value that we provide to customers.”

To learn more about the Intelligent Monitoring Engine, get all the details with our comprehensive datasheet.

Chad Swiatecki is a business writer and journalist whose work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Billboard, New York Daily News, Austin Business Journal, Austin American-Statesman and many other print and online publications. He lives in Austin, Texas and is a graduate of Michigan State University. Find him online on LinkedIn.