Real time distributed monitoring of services over IP

IP networks are increasingly being used for the provision of real time media services. This raises new challenges for QoS assurance through real time monitoring due to the complexity of distribution and the need for information correlation across a number of protocols. New tools and approaches are being developed. In this paper we report early results on one such tool, DRAI. In particular we show how a distributed shared memory approach can enable seamless application distribution and integration between the component parts with minimal impact on the application. The initial application of the framework is for VoIP but the framework can be extended to other IP based content services. Preliminary results from commercial ISP deployment are reported.