Need to monitor media port utilization on 8510

[drpeterson]

Info on MCU:

Cisco TelePresence MCU MSE 8510

Serial number     SM021XXX

Software version     4.4(3.49)

Build     6.18(3.49)

Uptime     6 days, 22 hours, 15 minutes

This is a HD blade that is configured for 40 media ports

I need to be able to look at the port utilization over time to find out when we exceeded the max number of ports and the caller was dropped to audio only

Thoughts?

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Dan

[Patrick Sparkman · Accepted solution]

You can find out exactly what you're looking for in the Event Logs.  I just maxed out our 8510 by one participant, even dropping the very  first one I added in the test which matched my port allocation instead of going over by 1 to allow sending of video, results of my test are below.

30330	17:40:09.423	CONFERENCE	Info	unable to send video to "Patrick Sparkman" -  allocation exceeded
30331	17:40:09.536	CONFERENCE	Info	now able to send extended video to "Patrick Sparkman"

[Patrick Sparkman · Accepted solution]

One very easy tip in searching in the event logs is to go to Logs > Event display filter, and input "allocation exceeded" for the filter string and update display.  Once you do that, it will take you to the event logs and only show you the logs that contain that string.  You can quickly find out when you've maxed out your MCU's video resources.

Just don't forget to go back when you're done and clear the filter string and update display, that way the event log will show up in whole again.

[drpeterson]

Okay thanks that does help. at least it gives me the search string "allocation exceeded" that I had no idea what message it sends to indicate the failure..

I am looking for a sanity check on this...

"Event Display Filter" will only filter on the message portion of the event. For example I can not search on "Info" or "CONFERENCE", but I can search on allocation exceeded, can someone verify that for me?

What level of loggin need in syslog to get the MCU to send "info" to a syslog server? I have many more tools to parse syslog files than I have time to log into a MCU and manualy dump an event log.

Thanks in advance

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Dan

[Patrick Sparkman]

Not a problem, I didn't know of it either until just a little bit ago when I did that test, I figured it should put something in the logs, but didn't know what - now we know.

As far as your other questions, someone else that does more than just simple skim over event logs like me will have to help on those.

Don't forget to rate/mark replies as answered when you've gotten all the information you're looking for, to help the next person.

Sent from Cisco Technical Support iPhone App

[Paulo Souza]

Hi Daniel,

I agree with you, it is really bad to have to check Conductor everytime to check if a resource has reached the limit. In this case, I would suggest you to use a remote syslog server where you can upload all the events generated by Conductor, so that you can create specific scripts in the syslog server to filter the logs and send alarms to some email address as desirable.

Take a look at this guide starting on the page 27, it describes all the events raised by Conductor.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/telepresence/infrastructure/conductor/api_guide/Cisco_TelePresence_Conductor_API_Guide_XC2-0.pdf

For example, there is an event with the level "warning"called "Conference bridge pool resource usage is approaching full capacity". This is the best option to check if a MCU is almost out of resource, because in this case, you will be informed before a participant gets connected with audio only, that is pretty better. Furtheremore, you configure when Conductor will raise this waning based upon a certain utilization level. You can configure the parameter "threshold" in the conference bridge settings, the default value is 80%, I normally use 90%, so everytime a MCU reaches 90% of usage Conductor raises a warning message and you can have this message sent to a syslog server as well.

SNMP won't help you in this case, because the support for SNMP in Conductor is very poor.

I hope this help.

Regards

Paulo Souza

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[Paulo Souza]

In addition, the following event is applied when a resource reaches its total capacity: Conference bridge pool resource usage has reached full.

That can also be helpfull to you. You will be able to check when the resource is almost getting out and when it gets out indeed.

Regards

Paulo Souza

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[drpeterson]

Thanks for the reply.

Please note that I dont have a Conductor - only an MCU to be able to ge tthe information from, however; it sounds like the conductor would not help me in this situation.

Thanks for the reply and link

[Paulo Souza]

Sorry guys!!

I totally misunderstood, I really thought you were talking about Conductor too.

But Conductor is a nice option anyhow to control MCU resources.  =)

Regards

Paulo Souza

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