Data is mined at all levels, from infrastructure through to the AEP and SM application layers. It is stored for reporting, trending and analytical purposes. VSM specifically targets critical areas in AEP that are responsible for almost all outages.
AEP software services can stop, causing an outage. Every minute the dashboard polls the software services at an application level to ensure they are responsive.
VSM dashboards run the same diagnostic commands experienced engineers run when they are identifying problems. These commands are run on a minute to minute basis, and the results are displayed on a dashboard, color-coded to reflect solution health. Benefits include:
- Provides a real time view of VPMS and MPP health at a glance
- Significantly reduces time to repair by pin-pointing the underlying cause of issues – the item(s) on the dashboard that are red are the most likely cause of an issue or impending issue
To achieve this level of management, we need to consider the components (possible) within the AEP ecosystem:
- VPMS – Voice Portal Management System
- EPMS – Experience Portal Management Server
- MPP – Media Processing Platform
- AppServer – Application Server (most commonly Apache Tomcat, IBM WebSphere)
- Speech Server – Text to speech and speech recognition (most commonly Nuance)
Note: The VSM dashboards understand the role of the server under management. So if a server is running all Experience Portal components, the dashboard will automatically configure itself to show the status of all components. Similarly, if a server is only running a portion of Experience Portal components like VPMS or MPP separately, the dashboard will only display the status of these components.
AEP VPMS dashlet
Combined VPMS MPP AppServer System Health dashlet
Server Infrastructure
Basic server performance such as processor, memory and disk utilization is displayed. Faults such as memory leaks are easily identified. The dashboard also displays the time since the last reboot, so if there is an IT policy applied to this preventative action, the status is easily seen.
Software Services Status
AEP software services can stop, causing an outage. Every minute the dashboard polls the software services at an application level to ensure they are responsive.
Trunk Status
The Trunk Group Name, port count, trunk port status and number of connected calls are displayed.
Application Status
AEP can run multiple applications, for example a banking and an insurance application can co-reside and provide callers with different functionality. The Application Status displays a breakdown of the calls in progress, which applications are being utilized and whether the call is inbound or outbound.
picture coming