Troubleshooting tends to be a huge headache for modern telcos since CSPs usually combine a whole range of different VoIP systems to provide services to their customers. For example, when a work phone number rings on a user’s Microsoft Teams (which has become very common during the current pandemic), the call may arrive via traditional telephony lines to the VoIP media gateway, then travel to Softswitch for intelligent routing and then to Microsoft-approved SBCs to establish direct routing with Microsoft Teams.
If something does not work as expected, the administrator has to reconstruct the original call flow by assembling the data from all three components mentioned above — and then analyze it. Any of those components might have caused the error and all have to be checked, making this a tedious job if done manually.
PortaSwitch has a built-in tool for SIP troubleshooting: you can track the call flow using the web interface and easily discover what might be the reason for the error. For many other VoIP systems, the troubleshooting tools basically mean browsing through large text files using a command-line interface — you’ll have to search through each of them separately and then carefully consolidate the data from different sources to get to the problem’s root cause. This surely makes the troubleshooting less effective.
PortaOne is partnering up with Dashbase to enable much faster and easier troubleshooting in multi-vendor and multi-node VoIP networks and provide our clients with a single UI that allows searching through all the multiple entities engaged in the call-flow.
As a high-performance indexing engine, Dashbase can easily process huge quantities of SIP, and other telephony logs from different platforms and consolidate the data, thereby enabling fast and easy troubleshooting. Dashbase collects log file data from multiple entities in the VoIP environment that are engaged in the call flow and makes it accessible via a single UI.
It separates this data into several events, providing users with a visualization of the entire call as it hubs through different servers throughout the system. Rather than downloading text data for all the events associated with a call and then mentally combining the collected info, all this data can be easily tracked from symptom to root cause using Dashbase. In a matter of minutes, you can identify which system or platform caused the error, contact the support team of the relevant vendor, and proceed immediately to solve the problem.
According to 8×8, one of Dashbase’s customers, they spend 30-40% less time figuring out the root causes and dealing with escalations. It saves them a tremendous amount of time. If you take a team of 20-30 people and you give 30-40% of their time back to them, that’s significant savings.
Alex Munk, Dashbase CEO
Because Dashbase is a cloud service, it does not require any special hardware. To start using it, a CSP installs a ready-made parser — a collector that “lives” on different servers involved in the service, monitoring their log files, collecting new logs, and sending them to Dashbase. Once all the logs have been transferred to Dashbase, they are completely searchable via the single UI
In PortaOne’s experience, this tool has been really simple to use. All we had to do was to install Dashbase’s collector and then start using the service.
Andriy Zhylenko, PortaOne CEO
PortaOne’s and Dashbase’s conjunction benefits
As an effective tool for easily searching through huge quantities of data, Dashbase is the perfect solution for agile CSPs operating in complex VoIP environments with multiple integrated components. The partnership between PortaOne and Dashbase allows our clients to quickly and easily track the entire call flow through different systems using a single interface and identify which components are causing problems, thus saving up to 40% of the time previously needed to diagnose them.
