NetTool gives the best detail in a Cisco VoIP network. When we placed it inline with a Cisco 7941 phone, it reported almost everything we could have wanted and gave some surprising information too. It detected the PoE from the switch and passed the power to the phone and ran Autotest (though we had to wait for the phone to reboot). NetTool records everything being communicated by the phone during its boot process. You can execute the VoIP logging function and see the entire process, or you can execute the VoIP Monitor function and watch the call statistics for the RTP stream.
The logging feature records the exchanges between the phone and its CallManager. It also gives all the essential information from the SCCP packets as a call proceeds--even the digits pressed on the phone's keypad. This feature raises a security concern: Those digits could be part of a password if the call is to a voice mailbox or other password- protected resource. Unlike with Fluke's higher-end products, it's impossible to disable this feature on the NetTool.
In our Avaya IP Office environment, NetTool provided some of the key VoIP measurements and detected PoE correctly. However, it couldn't see the H.323 call setup, limiting its ability to troubleshoot the phone registration and admission process. A Fluke spokesperson said the problem was caused by some proprietary extensions to the protocol Avaya added. Furthermore, when we executed the Autotest function, power to the phone was cut and it took more than a minute to complete the test while the phone rebooted.
NetTool did detect the RTP streams and recorded both its own calculated jitter, the RTCP reported jitter, dropped frames and total frame count. Because the device reported jitter in only one direction, we used Fluke's analyzer, Protocol Inspector, to check the trace and found NetTool was correct. The Avaya system was sending RTCP frames in only one direction.
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