This week Packet Island announced a four-inch by four-and-a-half-inch appliance that plugs inline into the network. After it establishes a connection to the host, it continuously collects and monitors every data packet in real time for Voice over IP quality of service.

The initial solution from the SaaS (Software as a Service) vendor manages all stages of a VOIP service from pre-assessing a network for VOIP readiness to VOIP deployment verification, SLA (Service Level Agreement) monitoring and VOIP troubleshooting.

Part of Packet Island's PacketSmart solution, the second generation micro-appliance will include fail-safe operation during a blackout, ability to work with mirrored switch ports, VLAN support, and an LCD display for troubleshooting.

The traditional way of managing networks, using SNMP agents to poll network devices every five seconds to determine whether there is a network problem will not do on a converged network that combines voice, video and data on a single pipe, according to Praveen Kumar, co-founder and president of Packet Island.

"You need to do real time monitoring to look at every packet to understand jitter, latency and packet loss," Kumar said.