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Category Archives: Lync Monitoring

Free Skype for Business Monitoring in 10 minutes! – V2 Released

10 Friday Mar 2017

Posted by Paul Bloem in How To, Lync 2013 Monitoring, Lync 2013 Tools, Lync Monitoring, Lync Tools, Monitoring Tools, Skype for Business Monitoring, Synthetic Transactions, UC Sorted Tools

≈ 28 Comments

Tags

Free Monitoring, Skype for Business, Synthetic Transactions

Over the past 18 months I have had spells of sleepless nights at my disposal. What better way to utilize this time than to ponder on how best to monitor my Skype for Business environments.

Although this concept isn’t new (I release my initial attempt at this about a year ago), V2 brings many hours of tweaking and polishing. The end result is a more stable, user friendly application that can be deployed in under 10 minutes. That’s including watching my how to video!

Why is it useful?

There are many different schools of thought around how best to monitor environments. Some folks are drawn to the physical aspects and tend to monitor processing, memory and disk. While this is useful information, its hardly sufficient on its own as an acceptable monitoring solution for Lync\Skype for Business.

On the other hand, keeping a close eye on services and event logs can be most useful as well. This can lead to lots of verbose information and, on its own, monitoring services and events don’t quite form a complete solution.

My thinking involves generating traffic by means of synthetic transactions. It also involves a proactive approach rather than being reactive.

For example:-

If you cant send an IM from user A to user B then its broken, regardless of it being a physical resource issue, a stopped service, certificate expiration or some other issue we have yet to uncover. The fact that the IM attempt is failing is sufficient to get my attention and subsequent action.

Another example :-

If your test user cant make a PSTN call to a number of your choosing then there is a problem. Regardless of the true source of that problem (which will likely require an engineer). Be it monitoring service issue, SIP\PSTN issue from the provider or an issue with the SBC. It doesn’t really matter..Why? because the issue has alerted me and I am now looking at it.

What is this package?

It consists of two primary modules:-

  1. Skype Monitoring Tool – This allows you to run a selection of synthetic transactions against any Skype Front End Pool on a frequency of your choosing
  2. Monitoring Report App – This part monitors the results of the Skype Monitoring Tool, generates an alert email when tests fail and can also send daily and\or weekly reports of the test trends

Monitoring Reports.gif

Functions

  • The results of each synthetic transaction are recorded in the Event Log of the PC where the tool is running.
  • The Event ID’s represent both success and failure of tests with separate ID’s depending on the result.
  • Event ID’s also contain a brief description of the test being performed, and in some cases a hint to resolution.
  • The tool also has a Schedule tab that will setup a scheduled task to run the synthetic transactions on a repetition interval of your choice.
  • Any test failures can generate an Alert Email so that you can proactively address the problem
  • Instead of trying to replace your existing monitoring tools, this tool generates Event Logs you can simply add to your monitored stack.

What’s been added in version 2?

  • UI improvements
  • Lots  of bug fixes
  • Added an option for weekly reports
  • Split out the reporting and alerting functions allowing reports and alerts to be sent to different email destinations
  • Added the ability to specify the time and day for sending reports
  • Added the ability to specify custom subject text for both reporting and alerting emails. This is useful when monitoring multiple Pools as you can add a pool description in the email subject text
  • Ability to send secure mail, perhaps one of the more painful flaws from the previous version

DOWNLOAD

How To VIDEO Here

DISCLAIMER

This tool is NOT a replacement for the commercially available tools such as Nectar, EventZero or  Prognosis. If you are after statistical data and history, triggered actions, dashboards, network performance, Session Border Controller monitoring or even QoS and network monitoring etc. then please do spend the cash and talk to these folks.

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SQL Single Instance – Co-Locating all databases

21 Thursday Feb 2013

Posted by Paul Bloem in Lync Monitoring, RTC Database, SQL, SQL Single Instance - Co-Locating all databases

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Today I learnt something new…

Of course a Standard Edition Deployment cannot have co-located Databases on the Front End, if you wanted to add the Monitoring role or other database roles you would need full blown SQL elsewhere.What I learnt was that you can collocate each of the following databases on a single database server:

  • Monitoring database
  • Archiving database
  • Persistent chat database
  • Persistent chat compliance database
  • A back-end database for an Enterprise Edition Front End pool

You can collocate any or all of these databases in a single SQL instance or use a separate SQL instances for each, with the following limitations:

  • Each SQL instance can contain only a single back-end (RTC) database (for an Enterprise Edition Front End pool), single Monitoring database, single Archiving database, single persistent chat database, and single persistent chat compliance database.
  • The database server cannot support more than one Enterprise Edition Front End pool, one server running Archiving, one server running Monitoring, single Persistent Chat database, and single Persistent Chat compliance database, but it can support one of each, regardless of whether the databases use the same instance of SQL Server or separate instances of SQL Server.

WARNINGAlthough collocation of databases is supported, the size of the databases can grow quickly. For example, when you consider collocating the Archiving database with other databases, be aware that if you are archiving the messages of more than a few users, the disk space needed by the Archiving database can grow very large. For this reason, we do not recommend collocating multiple databases, especially the Archiving database, Persistent Chat database, and Persistent Chat compliance database with the back-end database of an Enterprise pool.

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