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.

ASM System Health Dashboard

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:

• The Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) or IP Address
• SIP Entity Name
• SIP Entity Status
• Address Map
• Date and Time of last response
• Last response latency
• Last SIP reason code

Unmonitored SIP Entities
If a SIP Entity is NOT configured for monitoring the entity will be displayed as Amber for the unmonitored links and the following will be displayed:

• FQDN
• IP Address
• SIP Entity Name
• Status = NOTMONITORED
  • SIP Entities are usually not monitored if they are not in production, or are connected to test or development systems.

SIP Registrations
A Realtime view of the traffic handled by your Avaya Session Manager(s) by:

• Primary registered
• Primary subscribed
• Secondary registered
• Secondary subscribed

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.

Session Manager System Health Dashboard drill down detail pages 

The dashboard understands the environment through the Configuration Management Database.

           
Drill down detail – Services                            Drill down detail – SIP Entities