Monitoring and alerting manual

A chart module consists of 2 main areas: the Legend table, and the Chart canvas, showing charts for all full-colored cells in the Legend table. If Legend table has no objects selected (no rows), you may add them by clicking on the Add button in the Legend table menu.

In order to show a new chart for a particular object/parameter combination one needs to simply click on the cell on the interception of both the object and the parameter. Clicking on it again will remove the chart from the canvas, but the cell will still keep the dimmed color to indicate that this chart has been accessed in the past.

There are 2 types of charts that are supported: lines and bars. Lines are for runtime statistics, like calls or EMA calculated ACD, ASR, etc. Bars are for Per-hour statistics, like Switched minutes per hour, or ACD calculated on hourly basis. Bar-type parameters are underlined in the Legend table columns.

See Time in system for additional info.

The area in Blocks showing charts. Charts may be added or removed via Legend table. The canvas consists of the very area where charts are drawn and the Chart menu, Interval strip, Chart grouping strip, Timezone strip and Axes strip. Charts that you see on screen will reload automatically every minute, or every "2 pixels", meaning the chart will choose a frequency to reload so that you may actually notice the changes. There is no need to reload a 14-day chart too often, after all. You may also manually reload the chart at any time by pressing the Refresh button in Chart menu.

Charts are drawn for the periods predefined in Interval strip or may be scaled to any period in time via Zoom. If a Cust interval was selected in Interval strip, moving a mouse over the Cust will show the very Custom interval. If a blue zoom area is selected on the chart, moving a mouse over it will show the zoom interval.

On the chart canvas it is possible to open a context menu similar to the table In-cell menu via right-click. There are Cross-links to other modules there: Table, Report, CDR, Calls. The chart object for which the filter in the cross-linked module is applied will be the last object that was added to the canvas by clicking on a Legend table cell. If you dont get the object you need in the filter, please just remove its chart and add it again.

When a blue zoom box is dragged over a chart, and View in CDRs is chosen from the menu, the interval in CDRs will match the zoom box interval. If the zoom interval exceeds 12 hours, it is limited to 12 hours in CDRs. The end of the time interval in CDRs will match the end of the zoom box interval.

It is possible also to move charts to the left or right and automatically load new portions of charts by either:

• ctrl- or shift-clicking on a chart and dragging, or
• shift-scrolling with a mouse over a chart

If a date is not shown on X labels in charts - it is shown in the hints if a mouse is paused over the time label.

The menu on top of Chart canvas. Consists of:

• = - chart comparison, see Comparison.
• S - stack charts, see Stack charts.
• G - toggle charts gradient.
• L - hide/show Legend table.
• Refresh - refresh chart data manually.

Reloading charts manually is not necessary most of the time. The charts will reload automatically every minute, or "every 2 pixels" if the Interval is too long to show changes occurring as often as every minute (usually for intervals over 12 hours).

Legend table is located above the Chart canvas and is used to add/hide/delete charts from the canvas, as well as provide a reference on which charts are currently active on screen.

To add or remove objects in the Legend table, press the green Add sign at the Legend table menu. See Object selection.

It is possible to move a border between a Legend table and a Chart canvas by dragging a gray handle on the right side between the parts of the block. If you ctrl-click the handle, the Legend table will be fully visible again with the height matching number of rows.

Active charts are shown as full-colored cells in the Legend table.

In order to show a new chart for a particular object/parameter combination one needs to simply click on the cell on the interception of both the object and the parameter. Clicking on it again will remove the chart from the canvas, but the cell will still keep the dimmed color to indicate that this chart has been accessed in the past.

You can add maximum 10 charts to the canvas. This limitation is implemented in order not to overload the DB and not to embarrass the work space. You may also use the Table module to view a lot of current values at once.

More options in the Legend table:

• Right-click or Shift-click on active cells will invoke Chart options window to change chart color or thickness.
• Alt-click on a colored cell will remove the parameter completely.
• Click on a blue plus sign to the left of some object names will show/hide their child objects, for instance, a parent object Customer may have child objects Areas, which in turn may have children Vendors, in this succession: Customer->Area->Vendor. If the object does not have child objects added to the Legend table, the Object selection window will pop up allowing to choose child objects that you want to add.
• Right-click or Shift-click on object names or, in fact, anywhere within the object name cell will bring up the Object selection window with the clicked object pre-filtered as parent to see all its underlying child objects, and add some of them to the Legend table if necessary.
• Moving the mouse over the object ID fields will show up an in-cell delete icon to remove this object from the Legend table.

• If there are 2 or more charts active in a Legend table, moving a mouse over a cell in the Legend table will highlight a chart on the canvas below.

Legend table follows all the common filtering and sorting rules as the rest of the tables, see Filtering.

The menu on top of Legend table. Consists of:

• Filter sign with red X - remove all filters. Will clear all Filter fields over column names.
• C - opens Column selection window where one can choose which columns (parameters) to have in the Legend table. Columns can be added/hidden or rearranged by dragging them up or down in the Column selection window.
• Add - green plus button to call an Object selection window to add/remove objects to/from the Legend table.
• Share - create a shared link based on the information displayed at the current screen to send to your partners. For more information see Shared links.

When the In-cell menu is invoked in the Legend table, 3 additional options will be listed at the bottom:

• Hide all charts - deactivate all parameters in the Legend table. Will make all active, full-colored, parameters (table cells) inactive, or dimmed, also removing all charts from the canvas. Useful if you need to clear the canvas, but still would like to keep the color associations to the previously accessed Object - Parameter cells.
• Clear all cell colors - will simply remove all colors from all colored cells in the Legend table. Useful if you have too many active or inactive colored cells and would like to clean up a bit.
• Remove inactive objects - will only leave the Objects that have full-colored cells, and thus have active charts on Chart canvas.

Chart options window is opened by Right-clicking or Shift-clicking on active cells in Legend table and will allow you to change each chart color or thickness. Chart colors are chosen automatically when you add a new chart by going in circle through all possible colors in the Chart options palette. However, in some cases to make chart contrast better against other charts, it may be necessary to change the color manually.

Object selection window is opened by clicking on the Add button in Legend table menu and provides an arrange box with left and right tables to add/remove Objects to/from Legend table. First of all, one has to find the Objects needed. The 4 columns with Incoming/Outgoing active calls, and hourly attempts help to pick the right objects that actually have traffic currently (or at least are hit with attempts) over hundreds (sometimes thousands) of objects present in a system.

A good way of quickly pinning the type of objects one is looking for is by entering the first letter of the Object ID in the ID field, see Filtering objects.

If child objects are needed - a blue cross sign to the right of parents will bring up the names and call values.

Object rows in the left and right tables are chosen by clicking the mouse with the Ctrl key pressed, or dragging the mouse over several rows.

To add objects one should move them to the right table by one of the 4 move buttons between the tables. Moving object to the right will not remove it from the left table. When done - please press the green OK button, or just close the window by the top right red cross to cancel.

Objects are not updated automatically in tables. If you cannot find a name you are looking for, there may be 2 reasons: 1.) the name was added recently, and you need to reload the page to pick it up (if it was added very recently, you might need to wait for up to 5 minutes, as new objects are fetched from the DB every 5 minutes), or 2.) The object has never had a single connected call. Such objects are ignored till they start making/receiving calls to save on DB space, as there might be thousands of dormant objects in some switches.

Chart comparison window is invoked by the = button in Chart menu and provides a list to choose the comparison period from. Once chosen, the corresponding chart with the data from the selected period in the past will be loaded and shown as a dotted line on the canvas.

Stack charts are invoked by the S button in Chart menu and allow the user to view % of traffic per each customer, vendor, or area as compared to the total traffic of the containing Object. For instance, you may choose one Customer, and build a stack chart for every Area this customer is sending traffic to.

In order for Stack charts to work, you need to enable at least 2 charts of the same type for any of the following Parameters:

• Active calls
• Current capacity
• Attempts per hour
• Connected calls per hour
• Switched minutes per hour

Parameters should all be either Incoming or Outgoing, see Incoming and Outgoing.

It is also important to have a logical connection between all Objects in a stack chart, they all should be of same type, and children of a bigger object that should also be present on the canvas. For example, having Total system calls, and 10 large Customers on screen, or One customer and 5 main Vendors it sends traffic too will generate a nice and logical stack chart. While having 2 Areas, 3 Vendors, and 4 GWs may give you a chart with very strange results.

Pressing the % in Axes strip shows a % stack chart with total value = 100%. Pressing the S button again will cancel the stack chart mode.

If you had a stack chart on screen, and then removed all objects but one, you would still be in a stack chart mode, though the chart might look like a normal one. Please remember to return back to normal mode by pressing the S.

The Chart module can group per-hour statistics by days and show corresponding daily charts for intervals of 2 days and longer. There are two options in the strip:

• 1h for 1-hour grouping, which is how per-hour statistics is shown in charts by default.
• 1d for 1-day grouping.

Parameters that are not collected per-hour, like active calls or histograms, ignore the chart grouping setting.

Axes strip is a multi-choice options bar in the menu area above the Chart canvas with the following options:

• Split - split charts between 2 Axes.
• LR - same Axis on left and right.
• L - axis on the left only.
• R - axis on the right only.
• % - normalize all charts to 100%, one axis with the max value of 100%. This option is useful when comparing several charts with very different scales.

Charts can be viewed using just one Axis per canvas, however, in case chart scales are very different, some charts will be too small to be seen. Splitting the charts will create 2 Axes on the left and right, giving better chances that different charts can be clearly visible.

The colored Axes on the left and right of the canvas will indicate which charts belong to the left and which to the right scales.

Ctrl-clicking the Axis option will apply this option to all visible Chart modules of all Blocks on the screen. This is especially valuable when working with lots of charts in the Thumbnail mode.

Timezone strip allows the user to choose the timezone of the output results in Charts, Reports, Alerts, and some other modules. The strip has the following options:

• User - local timezone set on the user device: computer, tablet, phone, etc.
• Sys - system timezone configured globally. Defaults to GMT if not configured.
• GMT - GMT timezone

Adding 3 or more columns and 9 or more Blocks to the screen will automatically activate the Thumbnail mode, optimized for viewing a lot of charts on the same page. This mode has a gray color scheme so that small colored charts stand out and are easier to monitor. The mode also has only the Chart module available in it, has intervals only up to 2 days, and some other limitations.

The most convenient way of changing the individual chart parameters in the Thumbnail mode is by maximizing the chart you need to edit by clicking the maximize button in the Top menu, or simply double-clicking the top Block strip at which Blocks are dragged around.

One also may apply Intervals, Axes strip options, and Column selection layouts to all charts at once by Ctrl-clicking the interval/option.

Charts for Intervals <= 3 days, and > 3 days are displayed using different principles and 2 different sets of tables. The charts for preset intervals of 7+ days get data from special pre-compressed tables to speed up the extraction and processing of data. In order to show a 30-day chart from a non-compressed per-minute table, the application needs to request 60*24*30 = 43200 rows from the DB, all scattered over different areas of the HDD. This may take up to 10 seconds if the data is not already in cache.

Compressed tables have all values averaged and shrunk into 15-minute intervals. Most of the time one will see no difference between data from the main and compressed tables, however, compressed tables may result in a small loss of precision, especially for 7-day intervals. If you would want to get the chart from the original uncompressed table, you may click on the Interval of 7 or 14 days while holding down Alt and Shift keys. Since compressed tabled are much smaller, 7-day charts usually load faster than 3-day ones, unless they were accessed previously and are in cache.

A histogram is a distribution of calls by their duration, or PDD, TTC, TTR values. All histograms are available on the Chart module. If we take call duration histograms, the X axis of the chart shows the duration of a call, while a Y axis shows the number of calls completed with this duration. There are two histograms on call durations built in the system: number of calls distributed among seconds of duration for the first 300 seconds, and number of calls distributed among minutes of duration for the first 60 minutes. PDD, TTC and TTR histograms will show how many calls ended up with a certain PDD, TTC or TTR distributed among values 0 to 60. The last value on the histogram under 61 shows the sum of all calls where the value was more or equal to 61.

Histograms are great at showing irregularities in your traffic that might require investigation. A normal histogram of calls usually has a smooth curve, while if you have sharp peaks, for instance at duration seconds 24 and 68 - it will indicate an abnormal number of calls terminated with these durations.

Upon adding a new screen of the type Advanced statistics, the default column preset in Charts and Reports will be set to Switch traffic histograms. Parameters used for this include:

• The histogram parameters (In Sec Histogram, In Min Histogram, In PDD Histogram, etc), available only in Charts
• The second that had the maximum number of calls during the hour (In Hr Max sec), available in Charts and Reports
• The ratio Peak/Avg for the histogram period of 1-10, 11-20, 21-30, 31-60 seconds (In Hr Peak1, In Hr Peak2, In Hr Peak3 and In Hr Peak4), available in Charts and Reports

Activated cells of the Legend table for the histogram parameters display a peak value for a chosen interval (second, minute, PDD, TTC, TTR). Parameters In Hr Max sec, In Hr Peak1, In Hr Peak2, In Hr Peak3 and In Hr Peak4 are more convenient for using in Reports.