How can we be notified when Voice (PRI) provider is having problems?

[mitchell helton]

Hello!

Hopefully I'm posting this in the right section.  If not, I apologize, and hope you can place it where it belongs.  :)

Anyway, we've had this happen twice in less than a week now, where our provider has some type of outage (they haven't been able to tell us what's happening yet) that prevents calls from coming into (or leaving) our network.

I'm still a novice when it comes to voice, so I got TAC involved and they said there's a problem with the provider or our network because calls aren't making it to the CUCM server when we're having issues.  I feel pretty confident in saying there's not an internal network issue as I've got SNMP monitoring and Syslog on all our devices enabled. Additionally, on-net calls are working perfectly during these outages.  However, the provider is telling me they're not seeing anything on their end.

What I would like is to be notified that there's a problem before a user tells me they dropped a call, can't call out, etc.  Is there anything I can do (similar to IP SLA with routing) that could monitor something on the provider network so I would know when it's down?  Or is this just wishful thinking?

I hope this make sense... thanks in advance!

mitch

[George Thomas]

There is some capability but it wont be a sure shot solution unfortunately since there are many moving parts and many places where an issue could occur. For example, the PRI has a Layer 3 connection between VGY and provider, there are applications out there that can say if Layer 3 is down but if Layer 3 is up and the provider is having an issue which prohibits incoming calls, that will be difficult to determine unless someone picks up the phone and tries to call. You could also look at Prime collaboration assurance to give some level of details as to ISDN up/down, QoS issues and some amount of dropped calls but it all depends on cause codes. 

[Dennis Mink]

Depends on how your gateway is set up, if you would use an MGCP controlled vocie gatway, you could configure all kinds of alerts in the events of your PRI dropping. Use RTMT alert central notifications.  You can set it up so that an email alert is sent out in the event of an outage. very simple and effective.

[Gordon Ross · Accepted solution]

The symptoms you describe (dropped call, call not connecting) can be attributed to both a problem and normal behavior. A dropped call is indistinguishable from a normal call clear, and a call not connecting could be wrong number, mobile not switched on, etc. So you'll have lots of false positives to go with your real problems.

RTMT (as George mentioned) can do some things for MGCP controlled gateways - but it'll only kick in for Layer 1 & 2 problems. If there's a layer 3 problem (which is sounding like what you're having) then RTMT wouldn't notice.

The best I can come up with, would be to monitor the number of calls across the PRI. If it hits zero during the day, then you know something's up.

GTG

[mitchell helton]

Thanks for the replies guys.  We're doing H323 so the MGCP solutions won't work for us unfortunately.

Gordon, your suggestion is the most feasible for our setup, but we'll likely get false alarms occasionally.  We're a relatively small company and there will probably be periods during the day when everything is working fine, but there just aren't any calls coming in.

Anyway, I really appreciate everyone's input.  

Thanks again!