Avaya Aura - ACM

Dashboard features and functionality
Version 1.2

Contents
Table of Contents
1.0 Introduction
2.0 Avaya Communication Manager
3.0 Managing ACM in real-world environments
4.0 VSM and ACM System Health

Figures
Figure 1 – Capacity Manager OS Memory Usage
Figure 2 – ACM System Health Dashboard
Figure 3 – Drill down detail pages: Media Gateway, Services Status, DS1s
Figure 4 – ACM System Health, Selectable Layout in settings
Figure 5 – Multiple Trunk Group Traffic
Figure 6 – Trunk Group Traffic
Figure 7 – Trunk Group Summary
Figure 8 – IP Network Region Registered End-points
Figure 9 – Intervening IP Network Region Bandwidth
Figure 10 – Branch IP Network Region Bandwidth

Version History

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Introduction

ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is a set of practices for IT Service Management that focuses on aligning IT services with the needs of business. The ITIL processes all interwork, providing IT management with an end-to-end view of the technology and services being provided, maximizing uptime and providing a high quality experience for end-users.
VSM is based on delivering seven of the ITIL disciplines:

• Configuration Management
• Capacity Management
• Availability Management
• Change Management
• Release Management
• Continuity Management
• Security Management

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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.

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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.

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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.

1. If any changes are made to the architecture, the dashboard will automatically reconfigure itself to measure and display critical capacity data based on the current configuration.

Items monitored include not only server processor, but also essential aspects of the configuration which have their own specific requirements and capacity limitations. This information is presented by way of several different dashboards within Service Desk.
The purpose of the dashboards is three-fold:

• 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:

• Provides a real time view of ACM 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

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.
Below is an example of a memory leak. When the memory being used (depicted by the blue line) reaches the maximum available (depicted by the red line) there will be consequences. Typically the application will run slowly, in some cases a restart will result.
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1. This historic report was generated within VSM Capacity Manager.

ACM to Media Gateway Connectivity Status
Configuration Manager constantly looks at the architecture and how it is set up to identify the current media gateway connection status. Alarms relating to media gateways as well as elements of their configuration is displayed:

• Alarms
• IP Address
• Network Region
• Current Media Gateway Controller
• Media Gateway type

DS1 Connectivity Status
Any DS1 Hardware that is detected in the configuration is automatically checked on a 15-minute cycle for connectivity issues:

• Errored seconds
• Bursty errored seconds
• Severely errored seconds
• Unavailable failed seconds

These checks show the status of the DS1 connection to the telecommunications carrier. Errors seen here often:

• 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

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1. If trunk groups are added, removed or changed, the content of the drop-down box is automatically updated.

The dashlet depicts the current Trunk Group size (in members) and the current number of active members.
Administrators can see total Trunk Group traffic across the system at a glance.
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1. If trunk groups are added, removed or changed, the content of the drop-down box is automatically updated.

The dashlet depicts the current Trunk Group size (in members) and the current number of active members, presented either as:

• Active Trunk Group members
• Active Trunk Group members as a percentage of the size of the Trunk Group

Administrators are able to see the current and recent Trunk Group traffic at a glance. If more than one Trunk Group needs to be displayed in this way, simply drag and configure as many dashlets as required.
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1. If Network Regions are added, removed or changed, the dashlet will be automatically updated.

In an IP-world, users can logout of their IP phones as part of normal use. Accordingly, no alarms are generated as IP endpoint deregistration is not considered to be abnormal. The downside is that site-wide (or even system-wide) outages can occur, where all IP endpoints deregister, but no alarms are generated to notify support staff.
This dashlet has been specifically designed to notify administrators of potential issues when there is a change away from 'normal' behavior. Users are able to see total registrations across the system at a glance. If the "Now" figure differs from the "Average" figure by more than 20%, then the "Now" field will turn red.

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1. If Network Regions are added, removed or changed, the content of the drop-down box is automatically updated.

Administrators can see the current and recent WAN bandwidth at a glance and the associated voice quality (MOS %).

1. It is important that the size of the real-time queue on the WAN circuit reflects the bandwidth being used by the real-time application. (In this case ACM).

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