Cisco's been aggressively promoting its Medianet marketing concept, which quite frankly in my opinion, suggests an enterprise purchase the newest in Cisco equipment. As an example of what I mean, view Cisco's Medianet Blueprint as well as 280-page Medianet Design Guide.
However this month, network performance vendor Plixer International released its Scrutinizer Medianet Reporting Module, which Plixer claims is the first performance monitoring and reporting solution for Cisco's Medianet. According to Plixer, its Scrutinizer for Medianet delivers detailed reports on all traffic related to voice and video and helps resolve issues related to choppy video or voice that has never been possible with NetFlow, until now.
To celebrate its Scrutinizer Medianet Reporting Module release, Plixer returned to its underground hip-hop network engineer roots. Always fabulously entertaining, Plixer's star salesperson, Mix Master Mitch, performs his newest hip-hop video:
Cisco Medianet Rap
Furthermore Mike Patterson, Plixer's president blogged:
"Now that we have upgraded our routers to support Cisco Medianet we have been able to troubleshoot VoIP connections with much greater insight. If you are not familiar with what a Cisco Medianet is, it's an intelligent network optimized for rich media. It is more than just a converged network because it is an architecture that is stream aware (i.e. flow) and not just packet aware.
"What is exciting for us is that Medianet traffic monitoring with our NetFlow collector has never been so comprehensive as it is today for voice and video traffic. A flow through the network can now be verified end to end and hop by hop for quality of service. This includes checks for jitter, packet loss, round trip time and more. It is important that your Medianet Network Performance Monitoring solution be able to provide this kind of insight.
"Take a look at this video (below) of an actual Medianet troubleshoot to understand what I'm trying to explain."
"As you can see after watching the above video, troubleshooting a Cisco Medianet solution is now possible with Flexible NetFlow exports. In some ways this is much better than IP SLA trends which are often based on synthetic transactions and not the actual connection the user experienced during the call.
"What a great evolution in NetFlow and IPFIX technologies. It is great to be a part of it."
