“Get those annual summaries for all of our communication technologies to me by end of day today.”
“If all the year were playing holidays; to sport would be as tedious as to work.”
Chances are you’re already running a number of reports to assess adoption, utilization, and other topics of interest to your management. The end of the year is a good time to assess a number of areas of your network that might not be among those analyses. What follows are a few reports you should consider running, if you’re not already, to help you assess 2016 and prepare for 2017.
Note: For all of these reports, you will want to set your date range to the desired period, presumably all of 2016.
This will let you see at a glance the growth or trend in overall bridge usage, but also identify which bridges are now carrying the largest portion of your load.
Even in a somewhat random video network like ours, where usage levels are highly influenced by software testing (in the above we have deselected both MCU and RMX bridges as they only host test calls on our network), trends are noticeable; chances are that your usage patterns will be even more definitive.
You may be already using one of our Top/Bottom Ten panels to track this on an ongoing basis, but the end of year is a good time to dive a bit deeper and determine which of your endpoints might be getting a little dusty from lack of use.
You can also use the filtering capability criteria to further refine the picture for you as needed, or the model selection dropdown to focus on, say, group/immersive endpoints or perhaps unused personal models.
Similar to above, it’s a good idea to see if you have some WebEx accounts/CMRs that are going unused.
You can then click on the No Meetings bar to bring up the licensed Cisco WebEx hosts who have not actually hosted a meeting for the previous year.
The Call Status chart is often an eye-opener, revealing many more “Not Connected” calls than one would typically expect.
Selecting the Not Connected section of the donut chart will bring you to a list of these calls. A quick look will likely reveal that many of these source caller and target caller addresses are suspect. They are most likely failed attempts to dial into your video network by various SIP bots or hackers intent on hijacking your UC network for toll fraud. The good news is that if the Status is Not Connected, your search rules, policies, and other UC edge security measures are functioning successfully.
Additional details can be found on this Call Details page. For example, you can select the connection failure issue by using drop-down Disconnect Reasons filter. The most common reasons are No Route To Destination or Callee Not Found. It’s possible to get these error codes from a simple misdial, but a large volume of calls in these categories will typically indicate unauthorized attempts to dial into or through your UC network. So these metrics can be helpful in pinpointing sources of the calls, adding these to deny lists or instituting other security policies that further impede these would-be hackers.
Learn how to schedule and send reports automatically so you never have to waste time again.
We’re always available at www.vyopta.com/support to answer any questions.
Thanks for reading! Let us know if you have some “go-to” panels or reports of your own that help you keep on top of your UC environment. We would love to hear from you!