BroadSoft

PacketSmart On-Demand

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and IT Value Added Resellers (IT-VARs) know that customer network issues are much more complex today due to converged media deployments. With most businesses now relying more than ever on the smooth functioning of their IT networks, it is imperative to be able to solve IT network problems quickly. However, due to today's network complexities, problems often require an expensive truck roll (i.e. an expert technician dispatched to the site) to analyze and diagnose problems.

Even after the truck roll, it takes expensive tools and long hours to troubleshoot complex and transient converged media network issues - in fact, experts agree that diagnosis takes 90% of the work in today's converged media networks, while the fix may be a simple configuration change or upgrade. Due to the high cost of a truck roll, most customer issues get into a stale-mate with neither the SMB nor the MSP willing to bear the cost of diagnosing the problem.

PacketSmart On-Demand is an on-demand managed IT service that MSPs and IT-VARs can use to deliver remote IT diagnostics and troubleshooting services. With On-Demand, truck rolls become meaningful because they are backed by the guarantee of problem resolution. This on-demand service is made possible by a permanently deployed 4"x5" micro-appliance deployed at each customer site, and activated only when there is a problem that needs remote diagnosis.

On-Demand Features:

• Remotely assess customer WAN links by generating call to dedicated Internet call targets
• Monitor live VoIP calls on a per-second basis
• Monitor QoS on live VoIP calls, and generate test calls with multiple QoS settings
• Monitor traffic flows and top talkers to locate customer endpoints and apps that cause congestion
• Capture packets for protocol analysis in Ethereal/Wireshark compatible format
• Remotely perform network behavior analysis to determine how customer network usage could be optimized

Service Provider Benefits

Increased revenue

Annual maintenance service revenue for a fixed number of hours of remote troubleshooting and wellness assessment (additional effort charged at an hourly rate), plus service and system upgrade revenue resulting from remote diagnosis.

Efficient Diagnosis

Get past vague descriptions such as "my VoIP calls are bad" to quickly characterize VoIP issues and isolate problems down to individual IP phones and network issues. Determine if the customer LAN has misconfigured QoS or if their ISPs are ignoring QoS settings.

Effective Problem Solving

Determine network utilization in customer’s LAN/WAN and pinpoint the users and devices that are causing network congestion. Remotely troubleshoot the most complex network issues that impact fax, VoIP, video, DNS, DHCP, etc. by leveraging the remote packet capture feature.