Since the initial outbreak of COVID-19, people globally have transitioned to working remotely. One result of that is there are many questions about how monitoring, testing, and troubleshooting UC environments might be different than it was before. Today, we're launching a new series of video tutorials on the IR community designed to help: IR’s Troubleshooting Masterclass – Prognosis Tutorials for Effective Remote Working.

With the release of 11.7, there is a fresh new version of the Platform Support Lifecycle available. If you have not previously encountered this document, it is a list of all the versions of applications, operating systems, and middleware supported for monitoring by Prognosis. This document can be your best friend in aligning your Prognosis upgrades to support your application and platform upgrades.

Prognosis 11.7 is now available. It includes new and improved management and performance capabilities to improve operational efficiency, save time and reduce costs.

IR Summit is fast approaching. In October, Prognosis users from all over the world will join together in Denver for three days of value-packed training, networking, and sharing of best practices. Here are 9 reasons why you don't want to miss it ...

The Prognosis 11.6 update delivers expanded vendor platform version support, new and improved management and performance capabilities, and improvements to call quality troubleshooting and Call Recording Assurance.

Having looked at the planning phase in session one of this series, we will turn our focus to the readiness phase. The all important technical capabilities assessment, ensuring the network, endpoints and users are adequately prepared for the move.

Hear first hand from IR's Global Head of Information Systems and Technology, Jason Schwendinger, on how he has been tackling these issues.

To join the session, click on the 'attend' button below.

Prognosis for Cisco UC has been around for over 18 years, lots and lots of little features have been added over the years. All of these are based on real customer requests for real situations where adminstrators need to handle and resolve. Here are three recent enhancements made in Prognosis 11.3 - 11.5 which might make your life easier in case you are not aware. 

At CLUS 2017, during the PSOCOL-2008 session on 'What's new across the Collaboration Solution Release', Cisco acknowledged they will be phasing out various old TelePresence infrastructure items like; TelePresence Server and Conductor,  replacing it with Cisco Meeting Server. With Prognosis 11.5, customers with the 'Room Based Video Monitoring' module will be able to start monitoring Cisco UC: Cisco Meeting Server (CMS) and TelePresence Management Suite (TMS). 

The latest version of Path Insight is now available together as part of the Prognosis 11.5 release, and contains a lot of exciting updates that can be used for deeper dive network troubleshooting. In this blog post, we cover some of the key highlights in the latest version of Path Insight.

New Prognosis 11.5 update streamlines management and administration to reduce operations costs. Expands monitoring and insight for Cisco video conferencing systems, and improves visibility, monitoring, troubleshooting, and end-to-end performance insights to ensure an overall quality of experience for UC users and meetings.

Do you realise that Prognosis has been enhanced in 11.4 to provide information for various media devices at a per device level instead of per server level using multiple data sources?

Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) has multiple interfaces for people to retrieve information to monitor the health of various components within the system like AXL SOAP, SNMP and SOAP Perfmon. Usually multiple tools are needed to see these differnt data , but the power of Prognosis is the ability to combine all the data to provide users with a single and complete view. Let’s use the various Cisco Media Device records like Media Termination Point or Conference Bridge that was introduced in 11.4 as an example to walk through how Prognosis gather and combine this information.

Almost all issues relating to speech to noise ratio - the contrast between the sound of your voice and all other sounds around you - can be improved by using a Skype for Business certified USB headset.

Learn what features/data points are available with Prognosis to help you manage your Cisco TelePresence/Video Endpoint

UC Optimization Guide for Pros

How to manage and optimize your unified communications environment

Ever wanted to reach higher? Do more than business as usual in the network tower? Cut out the time-consuming, mind-numbing tasks that fail to propel the organization forward? Then keep reading.  

This guide is for every frustrated Network Administrator, under-appreciated UC Ops Manager, and overworked CTO. It's geared toward large enterprises, but there are plenty of takeaways for smaller players too. If you want to get the most out of your unified communications and collaboration systems, this read (or skim read) is for you. It’s is jam-packed with high-level and detailed UC best practices. We encourage you to share this guide with your team. 

As part of the Cisco SolutionsPlus program Cisco channel partners and sales teams can select and sell IR Prognosis solutions for UC, Video Conferencing, and Contact Center in the Cisco SolutionsPlus program.

IR Prognosis solutions complement and enhance Cisco’s collaboration solutions by providing real-time performance management, monitoring, optimization, troubleshooting and analytics to help deliver a superior user experience for all users.

How to manage and optimize your unified communications environment

Ever wanted to reach higher? Do more than business as usual in the network tower? Cut out the time-consuming, mind-numbing tasks that fail to propel the organization forward? Then keep reading.  

This guide is for every frustrated Network Administrator, under-appreciated UC Ops Manager, and overworked CTO. It's geared toward large enterprises, but there are plenty of takeaways for smaller players too. If you want to get the most out of your unified communications and collaboration systems, this read (or skim read) is for you. It’s is jam-packed with high-level and detailed UC best practices. We encourage you to share this guide with your team.

Introduction

With unified communications, you’re not just enhancing your company’s business communication, collaboration and productivity. You’re helping each and every employee succeed in their work. You’re making your customers happier. And you’re contributing to your company’s bottom line. 

However, to fully realize these benefits and achieve maximum ROI on your UC investment, it’s critical to optimize your UC environment. That’s where UC best practices can help and why we’ve developed this guide.  

In the pages that follow, we'll take you from understanding your UC needs and setting your goals, to reducing your environment’s risk and migrating to the cloud or hybrid path. We'll look specifically at the big vendors – things to watch out for and putting your plan B in place.  

We choose the best ways to keep your finger on the pulse of all things UC and guide you on deciding which platforms are right for you. We'll even teach you how to troubleshoot your UC like a ninja.  

We'll help you benchmark your performance today so you can easily see the gaps, fill them in, and measure the impact. We discuss empowering your network team and even ponder the notion of whether they can wear the digital transformation cape. Lastly, we take a look at market trends, share expert insights, and look to the future of UC.

Download your copy - UC Optimization guide for Pros

Nemertes Research issues paper

For Unified Communications & Collaboration (UCC) to operate at maximum efficiency, IT leaders must carefully evaluate management and monitoring tools. Most, however, delay this analysis until they run into problems.

Almost 70% of companies have a digital transformation initiative underway. Given employees, customers and partners all rely on UCC to communicate and collaborate, outages or slowdowns by definition will slow performance, directly affecting the value metrics so crucial to digital transformation initiatives.