ComTrail vs. SolarWinds VoIP & Network Quality Manager (VNQM)

It is best suited for managing and monitoring homogenous networks where the design is similar across the board. The most obvious use case is to make sure the correct network quality of service is being maintained to ensure voice call quality in a converged networked. It would be less suited/necessary if the voice and data networks were segmented from each other.

Incentivized

• Quality of service monitoring.
• IP SLA Analysis.

Incentivized

• The impact on SolarWinds performance itself of configuring a large number of IPSLA operations for monitoring can be difficult to predict. It would be beneficial to have some tools that could warn or predict the results of doing so.
• Additional background information on the use case for each SLA operation type would be helpful to the user who may not be an expert in the field. The Server and Application Monitor product provides this benefit for application component monitoring.
• The tool should be engineered to allow repeated SLA node discovery for any and all nodes in the Orion Platform database.

Incentivized

Support is satisfactory.

Incentivized

Our VOIP system is from Cisco, so they suggested their Packet Tracer to help with managing our quality of service. We found it to be an extremely technical tool much better aligned with diagnosing a detailed issue rather than helping monitor and manage the VOIP traffic as Solarwinds does.

Incentivized

• VNQM has enabled our network engineers to see network quality issues from the end user perspective and thus be more proactive.
• The call records searching capability is very user friendly and has made it easy for VoIP engineers to troubleshoot call issues from a single pane of glass.
• We were able to implement SLA monitoring by leveraging an existing feature of our Cisco routers. No additional investment was required.

Incentivized