• Overview
• Experience Manager 5
• PESQ Active Testing

Experience Manager 5

Psytechnics provides service performance management for real-time voice and video Unified Communications systems. Experience Manager delivers trusted, independent end-user quality of experience (QoE) visibility in a simplified and actionable form to IT, support and operations teams.

Beyond IP Telephony

With requirements for increased productivity and flexibility, as well as the need for cost reduction, most businesses have made the move to an IP Telephony environment, taking advantage of the advanced call features, long distance call savings, and reduced cost of ownership that current IP Telephony infrastructure provides.

The next evolution from IP Telephony is the implementation of various aspects of Unified Communications and Collaboration, including videoconferencing and web-conferencing – a trend that is being strongly driven by economic and environmental considerations. Many businesses are recognising that delivering Unified Communications involves complex, multi-vendor, multi-technology networks, and the ability to detect and rapidly resolve end-user quality of experience (QoE) issues is essential for efficient deployment, operation and adoption.

Successful delivery of Unified Communications

To manage potentially complex UC implementations, operations and IT support teams need to extend their IP data networking capability with voice and video specific tools. This will avoid the extended and costly meantime to repair (MTTR) that inevitably occurs if operations teams do not have visibility of real-time voice and video performance. Visibility of QoE for each and every call is needed to allow support teams to be proactive – ensuring that end-user affecting issues are identified and resolved before a complaint is made.

These requirements have created strong demand for an integrated solution for real-time voice and video quality performance management based on true user experience and actual call quality. Such an approach must look in detail at the voice and video application behavior to give visibility of problems that are independent of the IP network: for example, echo, noise and incorrect speech levels in voice/audio and video compression artifacts, or image size changes in video.

Experience Manager 5

Psytechnics has undertaken a comprehensive usability and information architecture design in order to develop a completely new user interface for Experience Manager 5. This user interface has been specifically designed to deliver our proven performance management capabilities as simplified, business-actionable intelligence for IT management and support teams.

Other Version 5 enhancements include enhanced video performance management capabilities and the new Service Desk Manager feature, which can significantly reduce operational costs by enabling Level 1 support functions to rapidly identify the source of quality complaints and send trouble-tickets to the correct admin-domain/resolver-group.

Voice and Video Performance Management

Experience Manager delivers trusted, independent end-user quality of experience (QoE) visibility for real-time voice and video delivered by unified communications over next-gen fixed, wireless and cloud communications networks. Psytechnics' QoE based management enables quality based service level agreement (SLA) management together with cost efficient, proactive support which in turn drives user confidence and adoption to ultimately deliver the productivity gains promised by unified communications.

Product Description

Psytechnics Experience Manager is the award winning solution that delivers the promise of voice and video performance management. Version 5 provides fully integrated monitoring, reporting, rapid diagnosis and troubleshooting in a single user interface. Experience manager uses verified, vendor-independent measurements to accurately determine user experience rather than relying on network statistics or vendor specific estimates.

By starting with comprehensive monitoring of the actual voice and video performance across the network, Experience Manager is able to provide real-time alerting. This enables operations staff to immediately respond to issues by using the built-in diagnosis and troubleshooting tools to rapidly resolve problems. In addition, Experience Manager's reporting capabilities can be used for service level agreement (SLA) monitoring, troubleshooting and problem resolution validation.

The new Service Desk Manager feature allows Tier 1 support staff to quickly view calls made to or from a selected user and highlights any systematic problems with the media devices involved. The Service Desk Manager can also analyze the performance of all devices on the network and proactively highlight devices that are causing voice or video quality problems.

Psytechnics Experience Manager is a software solution that installs on industry standard hardware running Enterprise Linux. The solution comprises an Experience Server and a number of IP Engines (passive probes), which are located at key locations in the network such as demarcation points and gateways. A single IP Engine can monitor calls to and from thousands of devices. Version 5 has been designed to be easy to install and configure, and the benefits of Experience Manager can be quickly realized with a few simple configuration steps.

The redesigned web based user interface provides a number of views depending on user authorization. The Monitor screen is a high level dashboard view that delivers an at-a-glance health check of voice and video applications. The Troubleshoot screen allows the user to rapidly isolate locations that are causing voice and video quality problems and to drill down and see the details of individual calls and segments of calls – the user can even analyze calls that are in progress. Reports can be automatically scheduled and exported in PDF format, and in addition to using the pre-installed templates, the user can build and run custom reports. One of the key innovations in Version 5 is the filter that helps the user to rapidly isolate faults and validate fixes. The same filter is used across all of the screens thus enabling users to quickly exploit the full power of Experience Manager.

Managed service provider requirements were a key consideration in the design of Experience Manager Version 5, and operation in multi-tenanted deployments is highly reflected in the architecture of the product.