AVAYA G450 Port mirroring, all the limitations ? 3

[Tommy LB]

Hi,
I'm new to AVAYA world.
I wondered about the port mirroring feature.

We will have G450 Gateways, which includes 2 WAN Ports and 2 LAN ports.

The 2 LAN ports will be used in redundancy.
The 2 WAN ports not be used.

On these gateways we will need to copy all the voice traffic to a probe for some dialogs analysis.
So the idea was to use the port mirroring feature of the AVAYA box and here are some questions about the limitation of this feature, informations not found in the config guide :
- Can we mirror multiple ports ? (we have 2 LAN ports to mirror)
- Can we mirror LAN port to a WAN port ? (we already use all the LAN ports)
- Can we have permanant port mirroring without any problem ? (we will do this for permanant analysis, not just ponctual troubleshooting)
- Does the mirroring config survive to reboot of the Box ? (it must keep mirroring even in case of reboot after power outage)

Thanks in advance
Tommy

 

[kyle555]

I couldn't mirror the pair of L2 ports to the WAN port on my 430 - and it kinda makes sense. I think the verbiage goes back to the Cajun switches and when you could have more than 2 layer 2 interfaces on it.
Just get a passive tap?

 

[Tommy LB]

Thank you very much for your test Kryle ! We can forget the WAN port.

And what about just adding a "LAN card" in any free slots of the G450 Chassis ?

We though about TAP but they are not so passive.
Being "copper" TAP they have to be powered, so it insert an un-managale POF on the cables and it means a lot of stuff to rack.
We would prefer just a clean simple line of config.

Tommy

 

[kyle555]

They're media gateways. You can buy PRI cards, analog cards, but not NIC cards

I know it probably sounds stupid that the CLI guide says "you can mirror a range to a destination!" but the thing only has 2 layer 2 ports.

Give the CLI thing a try, maybe it will on a G450

But what are you really trying to measure? There's a lot in the gateway that might be able to help. But, if you're hellbent on letting some other thing sample all RTP and do it's own math, it'll be of no use.

But, the RTP debugs in the G450 are the bees knees. It'll alarm and trap on out of order packets, or on RTP packets inside the same stream that had different TTL (like a routing problem). In the session debugs it'll show you layer 2 and 3 QOS marking on packets it received per stream. It'll tell you what part of the packet loss was network or codec related (as in, 100% of packets got here, but you have 10% codec/pkt loss because 10% of the packets showed up too late to be useful)

So yeah, it can do a lot.

 

[Tommy LB]

Thanks for your help.

In fact the client just want to capture all the conservations to put it in a server (which can decode VoIP RTP flows in real time) that will analyse the "emotions" of end-users contacting the hot-line call-center.
So RTP flow copy won't be for any troubleshooting purpose but for some kind of conservations spying to feed a bigdata system.


Tommy

 

[kyle555]

It's a tough call. Kind of a system design question.

In theory, tapping all RTP would work if - you had a single gateway system that only had PRI PSTN trunks - no SIP - and only had IP phones. Then, yes, all audio would happen to be available if you mirrored the port.

Is this one of those live-coaching things where it tells the agent in real-time how they should adapt to the customer because the AI knows better than the agent that my tone is "not very happy and getting angry" so they should "show a little extra empathy" to me?

Because if so, and if you're a single gateway system, maybe scrap the port redundancy for the port mirror instead?

Or, if you're a call center and maybe recording your calls anyway - you've probably got all that CTI integration already setup - why not just mirror the port off the recording server?

If you mirror the gateway you might see double streams - phone-->G450 and G450-->recorder.

Heck, couldn't you just port mirror the upstream data switch that the G450 is connected to?

 

[Wanebo]

Kyle555
"Heck, couldn't you just port mirror the upstream data switch that the G450 is connected to? "

That's what I would do. Set up a RSPAN on the upstream switchport and send the data down the network to the switchport of the receiving server.