Avaya IP Office System Status

I’ve recently “discovered” a brilliant utility called IP Office System Status.

Well....I’ve known about it for quite a while but just recently started to use it and it’s very useful. It allows you to quickly get quite detailed information on what’s going on with your phone system and has a number features that could come in use for troubleshooting problems with the system.

You get the option to install this when you install the System Manager application and it’s definitely worth installing. It runs in a browser and is very easy to use to see lots of information about your phone system including.....

Active Calls

For the most part I’ve been using it to monitor our phone system.

I can quickly get a feel for utilization levels of the system by keeping an eye on active calls. I can make sure that we have the right numbers of trunks available for incoming and outgoing calls.

This is useful both from a point of view of if we have enough and also if we have too many and we could save some money by reducing the number of channels.

We use both ISDN and SIP and I can see each of those listed separately in this application. For instance on the ISDN channels I can see each channel when it is in use and if it is Idle, for how long it has been idle. If I start to see channels being idle for a long period of time I may start to think if we really need to be paying for them.

Information on Extensions

Another nice feature of this application is the ability to see information on the extensions on the system. You can see a nice table of information including the type of telephone, Extension number, User name and some things that can be useful for troubleshooting including IP address or slot number (if it’s an analogue handset), MAC address, telephone type and number of new messages (if they have voicemail enabled).

You can click on individual extensions and drill down to more detailed information such as if they have forwarding turned on or Do Not Disturb.

Voicemail

The IP office system status application also shows a nice table of information on voicemail.

Here you can easily see which users on the system have voicemail enabled and if they have new messages and saved messages.

It also shows if their voicemail is configured to copy or alert via email and the address that it will be sent to.

Alarms

 You can quickly get an overview of the health of your system by checking the alarms.

This can be a useful warning to issues you might not ordinarily be aware of.

The first section to look at is the configuration. The errors I most commonly see here are DDI errors where an external caller has tried to call a number Direct Dial number that we don’t actually use so it’s not something that I need to worry about. However in some cases it could be that as an organisation you need to check that you are not publishing numbers that are never dealt with.

Service Alarms will show things such as incorrect logins which in most cases will simply be someone entering their passcode incorrectly but can highlight attempts to compromise the system.

Turnks will show you issues on your lines and highlight if there is any loss of service to your system.

Call Quality of Service alarms will show you any issues on your network that are affecting calls such as jitter or delays.

Summary

Hopefully this has been a useful overview of some of the ways IP Office System Status can help you administer your phone system.