Monitoring solution for VCS, specifically Traversal Zone Status

[Chris Swinney]

Hi All,

What do people on here use to monitor their VCS's (or Expressways)? Specifically, I would like to be able to monitor and be alerted on the status of a Traversal Zone.

TMS is be no means a Monitoring solution - at this it is completely pants (at best), and even if this is all you have to rely on (which unfortunately we have been), there is no way for it to inform you if a Traversal zone or similar is actually down between VCSs. The VCS themselves can be quite happily chugging along, yet an intermediary network issue may have caused th Traversal or Neighbor Zone to fail.

I did ask this very question several years ago, but I wonder if there is anything that anyone might have achieved since.

Cheers

Chris.

[Anthony Thomson]

I ran across this website a while back: http://justanothertechy.com/cisco-video-communication-server-alarm-notification/

It's got a very detailed way of monitoring VCS alarms using a Python script to parse the status.xml page of the VCS, via a Read-only API user account on the VCS.

It will email you an alert anytime a poll of the page shows there are unacknowledged alerts on the VCS.  It works well.

Given that the status.xml page also shows the status of the Traversal Zone, I bet the script can be adapted to do what you want.  But I'm not the guy with the scripting talent to do it, unfortunately, at least not without considerable time.

[Chris Swinney]

Hey Andy,

This looks to be very useful. Indeed, the status pages on our Expressways show a Traversal Zone to either have a 'Status Item' of 'Active', 'Warning' (when perhaps H.323 is up but SIP is down), or 'Failed' (when all active protocols are are not connected). On a VCS Control we see similar status items, but as each control may have multiple VCS Expressway peers, they we have additional 'Peer' elements containing Protocol elements, and then individual Status items.

I may well be able to scavenge what I need from this page on just the VCS Expressways, so I will let you know what I have been able to achieve.

It is still a shame that Cisco (in their infinite wisdom), have deemed that the status of a Traversal (or Neighbour) zone to be not worthy of generating an alarm!!!

Cheers

Chris