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Avaya Communication Manager

ACM (Avaya Communication Manager) is an open, extensible IP telephony platform that can be deployed as an IP PBX or feature server supporting a SIP-only environment, or as an evolution server supporting both SIP and non-SIP environments. Communication Manager provides 700+ PBX features, high reliability and scalability, and advanced features for productivity and mobility. Built-in capabilities include conferencing and contact center applications. A wide range of servers, gateways, and analog, digital, and IP-based communication devices is supported.

Managing ACM in real-world environments

ACM can be a challenging platform for IT support staff to monitor, manage and diagnose:

• When monitoring via SNMP the traps generated broadly cover infrastructure related issues only. Application layer issues more often than not go unreported.
• The SNMP traps generated only provide advice of incidents once they have occurred, meaning there is little opportunity to be proactive and prevent outages.
• Most often problems and incidents have to be reported by end-users, after there has been significant business impact, for example loss of call recording or other aspects of integration.
• Support teams need to enlist specialist engineering knowledge in order to correctly diagnose and remedy issues. Often these skills only reside within the Business Partner or Manufacturer which leads to delays in service restoration.
• Even with specialist engineering resources involved there are several dependencies that relate to architecture that can vary between deployments and are often misunderstood.
• Some incidents require access to historic logs that have either not been stored or have been overwritten.
• Often the root cause of an issue is never truly identified due to time constraints - a simple reboot can restore the operation of mission-critical applications and the business owners put pressure on IT teams to quickly restore service.

VSM and ACM System Health

VSM collects and stores configuration, capacity and availability information relating to the consumption of all essential ACM resources. This data is mined at all levels, from infrastructure through to the ACM application layers. It stores this information for reporting, trending and analytical purposes. VSM specifically targets critical areas in ACM that indicate business-impacting issues.

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• To enable IT teams to proactively identify potential issues and prevent outages.
• To provide a real time view of overall ACM health at a glance without having to rely on end-users reporting problems.
• In the event of a service-impacting incident to significantly reduce Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) and therefore to reduce the impact on business operations by quickly identifying the root cause.

ACM System Health Dashboard

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:

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• Indicate issues with port network or media gateway synchronization
• Are the cause of noisy calls
• Are precursors to a trunk-group outage as they indicate a declining state of health of the connection to the central office exchange

Related Dashlets

• Multiple Trunk Groups Traffic dashlet
• Trunk Group 
• Trunk Group Summary dashlet
• IP Network Region Registered Endpoints dashlet
• IP Network Region Bandwidth dashlet

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