Call Concurrency and Gateway Utilization

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Full Transcript

Hi. I’m Nick at Sideview, and this is a very quick overview video of how to use our product, ​“Cisco CDR Reporting and Analytics,” for call concurrency, gateway utilization, capacity planning, etc.

So, this is an advanced topic, and please refer to our core UI overview video. This video is going to assume that you’ve played with the product a bit and have run some reports and you’ve got some comfort level.

We’re going to talk about call concurrency and gateway utilization on the reporting side.

Now, this is an example of a report that just can’t really be done in the ​“General Report” UI. Computing call concurrency involves actually walking through the data and tracking and counting calls, especially if we’re going to split by something. By default, this will split the concurrency up by gateway and compute the concurrency separately per gateway.

First, however, I’m going to switch this back to look at just yesterday because my test data has a very strange spike in today’s data.

So, let’s say I’m interested in some circuit usage problems we had yesterday. This page will, by default, show you the call concurrency split out by gateway in this main chart here. You can see a normal intra-day pattern here. Everyone goes to lunch in the middle. You can change this to split this by call type instead. Let’s do that.

So inbound, outbound. And we can change this to device type and see hardphones, softphones, IP Communicator, and jabber devices. Notice below that all throughout this it’s been showing a second chart, ​“incoming and outgoing calls dropped because no circuit/​channel was available,” and it’s using the same time range so these will always be kind of mirrors of each other. 

So, if we go back to that main ​“split by gateway” concurrency chart, you can see we did actually drop some calls yesterday. Those calls are going to correspond roughly to peaks in the time, so you have to line it up a little bit sometimes. 8:40 am… it’s not always directly underneath. And here’s where we dropped the call: 8:40 am. As of the latest version of our app, you can actually drill in to that time point and it will now give you another call concurrency chart, just for 8:40 to 8:45 am. Sometimes this is useful, and sometimes it’s just eye candy.

We can also change and deselect some of our gateways. If some of these really aren’t subject to capacity worries, you can turn them off and they will not appear in the chart. Also, you can change this from incoming and outgoing. You can change this to look at internal calls. So, you can use this therefore for more than just gateway utilization. You can use this for internal support group capacity planning. You can use this as a general concurrent calls tool.

And that’s it. As with basically all of our UI’s, you can save and create, create a dashboard panel, create an alert, have it make a pdf of this as a dashboard, and email that pdf to yourself, and so on and so forth.

That’s it. I hope you’ve enjoyed this video. Please watch our other videos.