layerX Technologies, a provider of unified enterprise management solutions, introduced a new visualization and workflow tool designed to simplify the complex task of managing high quality unified communications services in private cloud computing-based environments (essentially, hosted PBX (News - Alert)).

With the new tool, called “prism,” IT staff can monitor, analyze, diagnose and resolve problems with applications and network devices in real-time with a special focus on Voice over IP (VoIP) quality management.

By automating problem diagnosis, prism reduces the amount of time required to resolve network problems. This frees the IT staffs and they can focus on more strategic IT projects.

prism is offered as part of layerX’s Arbitrator network management framework.

With the advanced VoIP quality management feature of the prism, IT staffs can monitor key quality VoIP metrics as well as trunk utilization and call detail records in real time. The integrated VoIP call path analytics of the prism allows users to analyze calls by source and destination.

prism helps pinpoint problems as they occur and ensures call quality by providing full visibility of each hop along a call path and live status of data network devices, the company said. It supports multi-vendor VoIP environments and includes equipment from Cisco, Avaya (News - Alert) and legacy Nortel systems.

According to a survey conducted in the first quarter of 2010 by Ashton, Metzler and Associates, 68 percent of survey respondents indicated that ensuring acceptable performance for VoIP traffic was very important or extremely important among IT professionals ranking the top 10 most important network optimization tasks, officials at layerX said.

prism provides IT staffs with a fast and a simple way to extract critical real-time and historical information from data it collects from Syslog, SNMP, RTCP, CDR, SMDR and more. Examining the in-depth informational metrics, associated alerts, and diagnostic probe results, it can help the IT staffs identify the location and root cause of network and VoIP quality problems and speed problem resolution.

prism’s easy-to-read alarm card view enables IT staffs to gain network intelligence. prism’s alarm cards can be filtered by any alarm characteristic and have a one click secure pass-through to analyze data and diagnose problems. prism offers great scalability as it provides real-time visualization of tens of thousands of devices from a single view.

The company announced that prism is now generally available as part of the current release of layerX’s Arbitrator platform within the VoIP quality and network management modules.