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Version | Date | Change Notes |
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1.0 | 2016-09-01 | Published |
1.1 | 2019-03-11 | Updated |
1.2 | 2020-07-08 | Update dashlet screen shots to show new UI. |
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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 Session Manager
SM (Session Manager) is the core of Avaya's Session Initiated Protocol (SIP) based architecture. The Session Manager platform makes it possible to unify media, networks, devices, applications and real-time, actionable presence across a common infrastructure, creating the on-demand access to services and applications that define the engagement experience.
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Managing SM in real-world environments
SM 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 a number of 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 collects and stores configuration, capacity and availability information relating to the consumption of all essential SM resources. This data is mined at all levels, from infrastructure through to the SM application layers. It stores this information for reporting, trending and analytical purposes. VSM specifically targets critical areas in SM that indicate business-impacting issues.
- 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 SM 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.
SM 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 SM 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
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ASM System Health Dashboard
- This historic report was generated within VSM Capacity Manager.
SM Software Services
SM software services can stop, causing an outage. Every minute the dashboard polls the software services at an application level to ensure they are responsive.
SIP Entity Link Status
The health of SIP Entity's (typically SIP Trunk Groups) is checked every minute. Conditions are represented by RAG (Red, Amber, Green) colors to denote the seriousness of the issue. If the SIP Entity is up and working, then it shows as green; amber is impaired and red is down.
Additional SIP Entity information is provided in the drill down detail page:
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SIP Sessions
Use individual SM dashlets to compare loading between Session Managers to ensure loading-sharing is working as designed. Sessions are shown by the media type that your callers are choosing to interact with, be it Audio, Multimedia, Text, Fax or Other. 
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- The dashboard understands the environment through the Configuration Management Database.
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Figure 3 – Drill down detail – Services
