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Category Archives: Skype for Business 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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Whats new in Skype for Business Monitoring Tool V1.3?

03 Saturday Oct 2015

Posted by Paul Bloem in Lync 2013 Monitoring, PowerShell GUI, Powershell Scripts, Skype for Business, Skype for Business Monitoring, Skype for Business Tools, Tools, UC Sorted Tools

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Free Monitoring, Lync Tools, Monitoring, PowerShell GUI, Skype for Business Monitoring, Synthetic Transactions, Tools

A few months back a new pet project resulted in an application called Skype for Business Monitoring Tool. Simply stated this application is a series of synthetic transactions in a PowerShell wrapper. The tool will run a selection of tests then report the results to the local event log.

Shortly after that a reporting module was added. The reporting module will compile an email report covering the previous 24 hour cycle of tests. The report includes a success vs failure rate and colour codes the ratio either green, amber or red to indicate health for each test in question.

What’s new in V1.3?

The following features have been added:-

Alert emailing

This is an alert email that is generated at the end of a test cycle if any of the synthetic transactions fail. The email consist of the Event ID and description of the error (the format is rough at present but server its purpose well – a review of this is planned)

UC Sorted Skype Monitoring
TIP
Since the FROM address isn’t checked for validity, I like to use this address to identify the Customer or Pool that’s reporting the issues. That way I can write an email rule that automatically deals with messages according to my required behaviour (eg escalate or also send to etc.). Of course you need to be sure that your email scrubbing policies allow these through.

More Tests

A total of 24 tests are now available, that equates to 12 new tests introduced in this release. These include:-Skype Monitoring Test

  • Group IM
  • Application Sharing
  • Persistent Chat
  • Data Conferencing
  • UCWA Conferencing
  • Web App Conferencing
  • Web App Anonymous Conferencing
  • Web Scheduler
  • XMPP
  • Audio Video Edge
  • Mobility IM
  • PSTN Peer-to-Peer

New “About”

A ReadMe.htm file now contains all the “About” information, version details, event ID references and notes. The ReadMe.htm file is also sent by email as the test email function

UCSorted Help File

Download

What’s planned for VNext?

A new module that monitors and reports on the Skype Server roles. The items I plan to include are as follows:-

  • Skype related Services
  • CPU usage and peaks
  • Memory usage and peaks
  • Disk usage
  • Daily report on Skype related Event Log warnings and Errors

Please do chime in if you have any suggestions or feedback.

-Sorted

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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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