Using Quality Information

Find Quality Fields

• In the app click the “Home” in the upper left.
  
• In the bottom half of the home screen pick “Call quality and qos”
  
• Read through the fields to get an idea of what’s available!
• Do note that the fields you see may vary –
  • Many older devices only report MLQK and related fields.
  • Most newer devices report the new CS and SCS based scores (Concealed Seconds and Several Concealed Seconds)
  • Some devices report both.
• Read more about this in our blog on the new quality scores.

See our blog post on the Field Gallery for more information.

What to do if you don’t have any of the quality fields?  Most likely, the answer is you didn’t turn on sending CMR (e.g. “Quality information”) with your CDR inside CallManager.  Go check the settings in the section “Get the call quality” in our docs, it’s an easy change and will only add a little bit to the license usage, but will add a lot of useful information.

Displaying the fields in Browse Calls

These fields are enabled by default. To see them in Browse Calls, simply add them with the field picker.

1. Click Edit Fields in the upper right.
2. Find the field you want to add either by scrolling around, or use the filter field.
3. Click to add fields to the Selected Fields list.
4. Click and drag to rearrange the fields on the right.
5. Remove extra fields by clicking their “x”.
   

Simple Filtering by Quality Fields in Browse Calls

In version 6.0 of our app and newer, there are context menus which make filtering/searching much easier.  You’ll still have to edit the search filters box occasionally too, but it’ll do most of the work for you.

Follow along with me!

1. Add the MLQK and CSR_overall fields to your Browse Calls by using the Edit Fields button as shown above.
2. Click on the *column header* for MLQK to sort by it.  You should now have a bunch of MLQK values in that field.
   • IF YOU don’t see those, you probably didn’t turn on sending CMR with your CDR inside CallManager.  Go check the settings in the section “Get the call quality” in our docs.
3. Click on one of those and select the option to search for MLQK=”<whatever>”, like I’m doing here.
   
4. In the search filters box above, edit it and change the MLQK="<value>" to MLQK<"4.5"
   • The quotes and extra zeros if such are in there don’t really matter as long as what’s in there can be interpreted as a number.  MLQK<"4.5000", MLQK<4.5, or MLQK<4.50 all work.
5. Press enter, or click the “search” button to the right.
6. Gaze in wonder at your not-perfect calls!

So while the contextual menus saves you from having to type in field names (and in many cases will actually work splendidly without editing!), for numeric values for now you’ll still have to edit the search filters slightly to change the criteria.  We’re working on that!

Similarly, you could

• Filter to a certain range of MLQK, like MLQK<"4.5" AND MLQK>"3.0"
  • Just add MLQK="<value>" and change it to MLQK<"4.5"
  • Add another one (it’ll let you do this as long as it’s not the same as an existing one) and change the second one to MLQK>3.0, so you have MLQK<"4.5" MLQK>"3.0"
  • There’s an implicit AND between the two, but you can always type that if it makes it more clear to you.  MLQK<"4.5" AND MLQK<3.0
• Find where either the CSR_overall or MLQKav showed the call was not great quality,  MLQKav<=4.0 OR CSR_overall>0.1
  • Again, pretty much the same process as above.  Add a filter for one item, adjust it.
  • Add a filter for the CSR_overall in much the same way.  Adjust it.
  • In this case, we then add an OR between them to change the default AND into … OR.  Sorry, I was being overly silly there.  I’m sure that was obvious.

These search filters follow you though to General Report if you click the “Graph calls over time” link in the upper right.

Simple Filtering by Quality Fields in General Report

Using quality fields as a search “filter”

The easy way to do this, obviously, is to go back to Browse > Calls (see above!) and add the filter there, then click the link in the right to >> graph calls over time to end up in General Report with that filtering set.

Be sure to make any other changes you want – restricting it to certain numbers, date ranges, call types…

These search filters also follow you back to Browse Calls if you click the “See calls” link in the upper right so feel free to hop between the two “views” of the data!

Using Quality as “over” or “split by” fields

A different way to look at that data is over MLQK.  If you are using the newer quality scores, you’ll want something like over SCSR_overall.  You could easily use *any* of the fields here, give them a try!

The app is smart enough to put the continuous “MLQK” scores into intelligent buckets.   Here the default of 0.1 sized buckets wasn’t bad, so I left it.  You can change it to a smaller number to have fewer, larger sized buckets via the # of bins setting.  Sometimes you have to change it a LOT before Splunk will snap to a smaller or bigger bucket. Try 5 then try 800 just to see what happens.

Or even more fun, split by one of the fields.  This means we go back to over time but then splits the resulting columns up by the split by field.  Well, a picture is worth a thousand words:

Note in this case there are *two* settings for # of bins.  The first is associated with the time, so setting this small gives you fewer but bigger chunks of time across the bottom.  The second is associated with the split by field, setting this one smaller or larger adjusts how big of buckets the MLQK is put into.  Play with both of those settings a bit (one at a time!) and you’ll see how they work.

Also note my mouse pointer is over one of the bars to see more information.  Those are clickable so try that and see what happens!

Other Notes!

Read more about this in our blog on the new quality scores.  It’ll be fun, we promise!  Well, if not fun, at least it’ll be useful!

If you have any comments at all about the documentation, please send it in to docs@sideviewapps.com.