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Category Archives: Lync Tools

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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Visio Stencil for Skype for Business Add-On Products 2016

17 Tuesday May 2016

Posted by Paul Bloem in Lync Tools, Skype for Business Tools, Tools, Uncategorized, visio, Visio Stencil

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Tags

Add-On, Visio Template

What do you call the collection of all the add-on items one can add to a Skype for Business solution?

Additive? Add-On? Supplement? Additions? I prefer bells and whistles, its descriptive and yet so elusive.

Every Skype for Business solution has some sort of bell and\or whistle. Be that some sort of video conferencing solution, Contact Center or IP Phone. What I find difficult is clearly representing these when architecting an environment in Visio. Wouldn’t it be useful to have all these sorts of supplemental components were in a visio stencil for quick access. And so the stencil is born. The theme is based on the same theme used through the Skype for Business 2015 – Visio Stencil   (an updated V2.0 will be out soon)

I have also added a second shape for most of the products in the template. The reason for this is that often a Visio is used on larger screens that afford a little more detail.

Acpect ShapesGenesys ShapesNectar shapesPrognosis Shapes

In some instances I have added additional shapes for the sake of variety of choice. For example:

Numonix Shapes

And of course a special mention for all the really cool endpoints, such as :-

endpoint shapes

If you have any additional requests (or corrections.. I don’t actually know all of these products intimately) please do reach out to me.

DOWNLOAD the Skype for Business Add-On Products Visio.

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Free Skype for Business Monitoring Tool gets Daily Reporting Module

18 Saturday Jul 2015

Posted by Paul Bloem in Lync 2013 Monitoring, Lync 2013 Tools, Lync Tools, Monitoring, Skype for Business Monitoring, Skype for Business Tools, Tool, Tools, UC Sorted Tools

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Free Monitoring, Skype for Business Monitoring

The more I think about this the more excited I become about the potential of the freely available Skype for Business Monitoring Tool launched early in July.

So today I would like to introduce my first update which I am labelling Version 1.2

What’s New?
Daily Report function of course.
This function will generate a daily email report based on the previous 24 hour test cycle.

A few tweaks and bug fixes have been included as well.

How does it work?
I will let the video clip do the talking.

Download

Credit goes to Guy Bachar for providing the basis on which the report email was developed.

-36.607229 174.789200

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