Leveraging Intelligent Monitoring and Alerts to Create Custom Collector Down Notifications

Introduction

Intelligent Monitoring enables you to proactively track the health of your WXP Collaboration Data Collector by creating alerts that notify you via email whenever a collector goes down, helping you respond quickly and minimize monitoring gaps.

If you have an on-premises data collector to monitor your on-premises infrastructure (Cisco, Polycom, Pexip, etc.), you will need to monitor it to ensure it stays online and captures all your valuable meeting and call data. One of the most common problems customers run into is when the data collector is taken down, network connectivity causes connectivity issues to our cloud, customer-deployed environment change, which all prevent us from collecting your systems’ data.

With our new release of Intelligent Monitoring and Alerts, we have added the ability to monitor the state of your on-premises collector. We can track the number of real-time calls (streams) currently being collected from your on-premises collector, and if we see a drop in your active calls, we can send you an alert. Not only will we send an alert, but we can also show you the history of the streams to show when potential collector problems started.

Finally, you can direct the alert to your team (or its members) and include instructions on how to take action (which you can change anytime). Gone are the days when an alert comes in about a collector issue, and nothing happens since the recipient is on vacation.

Set up a Critical Alert for the Environment

Here is how you can set up your Critical Alert for your environment today.

Note
If you are using WXP Collaboration to monitor only UCaaS systems like Zoom, Webex, and Microsoft Teams, you won't need to set up a collector alert, since all UCaaS systems are collected from the WXP Collaboration Cloud.

The Intelligent monitoring rules can be found by navigating to Technology Insights Monitoring -> Monitors -> Rules Tab to see all the Rules created for Intelligent monitoring. You can see the list of all monitors in the organization, including each monitor's current state.

Current State: The live reading of the current state
Enabled: The state of the monitor, whether or not it’s on (options include “Enabled” or “Disabled). Clicking the toggle in the table will change its “Enabled” value.
Name: The user-inputted name for the monitor (note, this is not necessarily the same as the email subject!). It is hyperlinked to the read-only view.
Category: The user-selected metric category of the monitor (options include Bridges, Call Controls, Calls, Endpoints, Meetings, Trunks).
Metric: The user-selected metric of the monitor.
Filtered by: The list of filters applied to the metric defined in the monitor.
Created by: The WXP Collaboration user who created the monitor.
Created on: The date on which the WXP Collaboration user who created the monitor hit “save” first.

By clicking on the ‘Name’, you can edit the parameters of an existing Intelligent monitoring.

Creating a monitoring alert consists of the following steps:

Adding the monitor
Defining the metrics
Setting the alert conditions and
Notification details.

In order to create an Intelligent monitoring alert, click ‘Add monitor’ and provide a name for the alert that best describes your Alert. In this example, we will create an alert to monitor the status of the WXP Collaboration Data Collector by checking whether WXP Collaboration is receiving any call data. The absence of all call data would indicate a possible problem with your collector if this occurs during expected working hours.

Name: “Critical - Collector Down Alert”

The first Section: Define the Metric

Category: Select the Category for which you want to create the monitoring. In this scenario, select ‘Calls’ ( see note at the end of this document ).

Metric: Based on the Category selected, the values in the Metric dropdown field will be populated with the relevant options. In this scenario, select 'Call Streams' to view a count of real-time calls captured by your on-premises collector.

Once the Category and metric have been selected, you can add any additional filters as needed.

To create a Collector down alert, we will be adding the following filter:

“Data Source does not contain WEBEX, and Data Source does not contain GMEET, and Data Source does not contain TEAMS, and Data Source does not contain BJN, and Data Source does not contain ZOOM."

The above UCaaS data sources are excluded because this data is not gathered by your on-premises data collector; instead, it is collected on your behalf by collectors in the WXP Collaboration Cloud.

Once the metrics have been defined, Set the alert conditions for which you want the alert to be triggered.

To create a Collector down alert, select the following values.

This alert condition means – When the Call streams are equal to 0 for consecutive 30 minutes, the WXP Collaboration Data collector is down.

Operator: The metric is compared against the thresholds using the user-input operator. There are 6 options - “Greater than or Equals”, “Greater than”, “Less than”, “Less than or Equals”, “Equals”, “Not Equals”. This is a mandatory field.

Thresholds: User inputted field(s) the metric is compared to with the operator. Critical is meant to signify the most severe, then warn, then info as the least severe. All thresholds are optional, but each monitor must have at least one threshold filled in. The Notify section is enabled for each threshold level only after a value is entered.

Duration: The user inputted value (in minutes) that the metric must satisfy the comparison of the operator vs threshold in order to count trigger a change of monitor state. This is a mandatory field.

Once the Alert conditions are set, select the details to include in the notification sent to your team. You can create different notifications to be sent for ‘Critical, Warn, and Info’ status.

Enable Email Per Threshold: Checking this box means an email will be sent when that threshold’s state is reached. Unchecking the box will not send an email. Note, unchecking does not invalidate that state from the “current state” live monitoring - you’ll still see it, just no email.

Subject: This is the subject of the email being sent. Note that it can be the same or different from the monitor name. We will automatically append the threshold state before the subject (i.e., “[Critical] This is the email subject” in the above example).

To (Recipient): This contains the emails to which the alert will be sent. When selecting the recipient, you will want someone on the list who will be able to take action on the alert once they receive it

Send As: Signifies the type of email being delivered. The three options are “HTML”, “HTML - Custom”, and “Plain Text”. “HTML - Custom” allows an additional input to customize the text in the email body.

An example of the email that gets sent out is shown below:

We haven't received any active calls with the WXP Collaboration Data Collector located on the server "ABC" over the last 30 minutes. If you have received this alert, please check that the VyoptaCPMDataCollector service is up and running.

Note
This knowledge base article will guide you through the steps that is needed to restart the collector.

Frequency: Currently under evaluation for inclusion, removal, or update, given that it is illogical under the “email send on change of state” guidance we are operating under.

Days & Active Schedule: These are the user-inputted values for when emails should fire. In this example, the alerts would only send an email Monday through Friday, 12 am to 12 pm PST. All state changes outside of that schedule would still be tracked in the UI, but no email would be sent.

You should be aware, however, that when an alert becomes 'active' by a schedule, the criteria are applied immediately:- therefore, should an alert be scheduled to become active at 08:00, and examines a 30-minute window (duration) data will be used for the preceding 30 minutes - thus if the alert would have been triggered with the data from 07:30 - 08:00 then an alert will be sent.

To avoid this, set the scheduled activation time to be one duration interval after the time that measurement should start - in this case, this would be 08:00 plus 30 minutes, or 08:30

Note
In this example we have used a calls metric to alert us when the WXP Collaboration Data Collector may be down. Depending upon your environment and expected working hours it may be appropriate to use a different metric such as monitoring Call controls or other infrastructure status.

Contact Us

For any assistance, create a support case or email support@wxp.hp.com.