Monitoring and alerting manual
No web interface is good without a robust back-end to obtain and store monitored data.
5gVision data polling mechanisms are as unobtrusive
as possible to the systems polled, and provide for very quick data retrieval.
Overview
The system has several polling mechanisms, and more can be added on request:
- Collecting VoIP statistics via uploading and processing switch CDRs. If CDRs dont contain enough infomation, for instance there are no customer/vendor names there, access to some other tables in the switch or billing DB might be required. CDR upload can be done in many ways: from the DB, over FTP, FTPS, SFTP, SCP, or any other method supported by your VoIP switch or billing.
- Collecting Active calls. This greately depends on your switch ability to provide this info upon request. The most common methods are: from a table in the DB, getting info from a specific port, or by connecting to the switch over a proprietory protocol or API. If your switch does not provide Active call data, 5gVision can estimate active calls via CDRs.
- Getting signaling or media logs to show Call flows and play recorded audio, see more in Traffic collector.
- Getting SNMP parameters through SNMP requests, see more in Config-SNMP.
- Getting External DB data via direct connect to the tables configured for each DB, see more in Config-External DBs.
VoIP statistics
The main principle of 5gVision VoIP stats collection is that CDRs are either polled
directly from the CDR DB on the switch every 15-20 seconds, in small chunks using an index,
or extracted via uploading CDR files as often as they are created.
CDR data is then processed and converted to various statistical tables, optimized for very quick search and retrieval. CDR records are discarded after the processing (unless CDR replication is working, see below).
When a user requests a chart or a report from the web interface - CDRs in the VoIP switch are not touched any more, all data is obtained from the internal stats tables of 5gVision. Thus, 5gVision creates 0 load to the switch DB for any user monitoring activity.
The only load created by 5gVision to the switch is to retrieve CDRs every 15-20 seconds, this load, however, is pretty negligible, and here is why:
CDR data is then processed and converted to various statistical tables, optimized for very quick search and retrieval. CDR records are discarded after the processing (unless CDR replication is working, see below).
When a user requests a chart or a report from the web interface - CDRs in the VoIP switch are not touched any more, all data is obtained from the internal stats tables of 5gVision. Thus, 5gVision creates 0 load to the switch DB for any user monitoring activity.
The only load created by 5gVision to the switch is to retrieve CDRs every 15-20 seconds, this load, however, is pretty negligible, and here is why:
- CDRs are stored with indexes on CDR date or CDR ID. Since 5gVision requests only the very recent CDR, filtered by date or ID, the query that is selecting CDRs is using the index and is very quick.
- Furthermore, since CDRs retrieved are very recent, and have just been written to the HDD, most probably they are still in the OS cache, and are provided from RAM, not HDD.
- 5gVision needs only a limited number of fields from CDR tables. The amount of data that travels every minute from a switch DB to a 5gVision server during the peak hours is usually less than 300 KBytes, including customers/vendors and area names, and info on active calls.
CDR viewer
5gVision CDR tables, unlike all other statistical modules
(Chart, Table, Report, Alerts) do query the switch CDR storage to retrieve
and show CDRs in the web interface. This happens because 5gVision is not keeping the copy of the
original CDRs by default, unless the CDR replication option is purchased (see below).
However, once you start viewing CDRs in 5gVision interface, you will most probably won't do it so often from your switch interface, and the load to the switch CDR tables will be the same at the minimum. But in fact, it will probably be less. 5gVision uses sophisticated mechanisms to lower the load to the switch DB as much as possible, and you can see it by comparing the speed with which CDRs are retrieved in 5gVision or in the original switch interface.
However, once you start viewing CDRs in 5gVision interface, you will most probably won't do it so often from your switch interface, and the load to the switch CDR tables will be the same at the minimum. But in fact, it will probably be less. 5gVision uses sophisticated mechanisms to lower the load to the switch DB as much as possible, and you can see it by comparing the speed with which CDRs are retrieved in 5gVision or in the original switch interface.
CDR replication
This module can be purchased additionally and will store the original CDRs
in 5gVision after processing them for statistical data.
CDR replication provides the following convenience:
- You will get another full copy of your CDRs for backup purposes.
- There is almost no extra load to the switch DB, as CDRs are retrieved for statistics anyway, they simply won't be discarded, but stored every 15-20 seconds, and more columns will be retrieved.
- The 5gVision CDR viewer will then query the internal 5gVision replicated CDR tables, thus freeing the main switch DB completely from the task of providing CDRs to user requests. This will take a significant load off the switch DB, especially if CDRs are frequently requested for long periods, like 1 or 3 days.
- 5gVision will store 2 CDR tables: full unchanged CDRs, and the CDRs optimized for long-term storage, that will only contain information needed for billing, and only records of connected calls. The second CDRbill tables are usually about 10 times smaller and can be kept for years, while the original unabridged tables may only be stored for 2-3 months in case some retroactive troubleshooting is required.