layerX Technologies, a provider of unified network management solutions for enterprises and service providers, recently announced the launch of a new visualization and workflow tool called prism.

According to company sources, the prism simplifies the management of unified communications or UC services in private cloud computing-based environments. Also prism will help information technology staff to monitor, analyze, diagnose and resolve problems with applications and network devices in real-time with a special focus on VoIP quality management.

Prism also aids in automating problem diagnosis thereby helping in the reduction in time required for resolving network problems. This offers more time for IT staff to focus on more strategic IT projects. prism forms part of layerX’s Arbitrator network management framework, said company sources.

layerX sources added that the prism’s advanced VoIP quality management capabilities will allow IT staff members to monitor key quality VoIP metrics as well as trunk utilization and call detail records in real-time. Prism’s integrated VoIP call path analytics enables users to analyze calls by source and destination.

The tool provides full visibility of each hop along a call path besides offering live status of data network devices. Prism also helps locate problems as and when they occur for ensuring optimum call quality. It supports multi-vendor VoIP environments including equipment from Cisco, Avaya (News - Alert) and legacy Nortel systems.

Ashton, Metzler and Associates conducted a survey in the first quarter of 2010 which revealed that 68 percent of survey respondents indicated that acceptable performance for VoIP traffic was very important. This feature was ranked among the top 10 most important network optimization tasks by IT professionals.

Even in the complex cloud computing environment, prism helps IT staffs to quickly and easily extract critical real-time and historical information from data it collects from Syslog, SNMP, RTCP, CDR, SMDR and more. The in-depth informational metrics, associated alerts, and diagnostic probe results help IT staffs to identify the location and root cause of network and VoIP quality problems, which help in rectifying problems fast.

Prism’s integrated event search tool, punq search interface, helps IT staffs to search among millions of network events within seconds to locate the most relevant IT events and also troubleshoot network problems easily.

“The convergence of unified communication services has added a new layer of complexity for IT staff attempting to monitor a broad array of network devices in real-time,” said Mike Kay, vice president of business development for layerX Technologies. “Prism is the tool that brings together the visualization and real-time analytics required for IT staff to identify and rapidly respond to problems anywhere on the network.”

IT staffs stand to gain a lot from network intelligence provided by prism’s easy-to-read alarm card view that supports multi-tenant environments. Prism’s alarm cards ensure a one click secure pass-through to analyze data and diagnose problems. From a single view, prism offers scalability as it provides real-time visualization of several thousands of devices.

(source: http://it.tmcnet.com/topics/it/articles/100473-layerx-launches-new-visualization-workflow-tool.htm)