Outages, SLA and raising a fault

Once a line is watched by a site probe or the outside checks, Tenvara keeps a record of every outage, works out each month's availability against the SLA in the line's contract, and gives you what a supplier's fault desk asks for in one sheet.

How an outage is recorded#

Nobody has to log anything. An outage opens when a line's state turns to down and closes when it comes back up. A spell of loss or high latency is kept as a Degraded outage.

Each outage keeps:

• Started, when it ended and its Length,
• the Cause, taken from what the site probe could still reach at that moment: the ISP (the gateway answers, the ISP's first hop does not), the internet (the first hop answers, nothing past it does) or the site's own network (the probe cannot reach its gateway),
• what it Hit: the devices and contacts at the site and the phone services on the line,
• the probe's traceroutes from half an hour before it began until it ended.

Some cases are handled specially:

• A failover. The primary line gets a down outage saying the site failed over, and the backup line gets a record of the time it carried the traffic. Time on backup never counts against any line's SLA.
• A whole site going quiet. When the probe and every other device at the site stop checking in together, an outage opens from the probe's last round with the cause unknown: the line or the power. If the probe's device turns out to have restarted during it, it becomes a power cut. A line that still answers the outside checks is not treated this way.
• Short drops. A drop under 60 seconds, or a degraded spell under 10 minutes, is not kept, unless it has a ticket or a fault report.

Adding or correcting an outage#

On a line's Outages tab press Add an outage for one the monitoring missed, or for the supplier's planned works. An outage the monitoring saw keeps its times as seen; you can correct the Cause, tick Leave it out of the SLA, add notes and the supplier's reference, or close it by hand if the monitoring cannot see the line come back. Only an outage added by hand can be deleted. Every change is in the audit log.

Monthly availability against the SLA#

Record the contracted availability in the line's SLA (%) field. Then for every month:

• The month is the calendar month in the site's time zone.
• Downtime is the time covered by down outages that are not left out of the SLA. Overlapping outages count once, and one that crosses a month end counts in each month for its part.
• Availability is the share of the month not down. The allowed downtime is what the SLA permits over the whole month.
• The verdict is Met, On track for the month in progress, or Breached as soon as the downtime passes the allowance, even mid-month.

Left out of the SLA by default: planned works, faults inside the site's own network and power cuts. They are outages the customer felt, so they are kept, but they are not the supplier's. Anyone who manages telephony can leave any outage out or count it again.

Note: Availability counts only the time a line was monitored. A month before the first check of the line says Not monitored, never Met, and the month monitoring began in says Monitored from with the date and is measured from then.

Where to see it#

A line's Outages tab shows Availability this month against the contracted figure, Downtime this month with what is allowed, Open now, and Months breached out of the months monitored. Below are Availability by month for the last 12 months with a Claim file for each, and every outage.

Infrastructure > Outages and SLA covers every line for a month you pick. Tiles show Down now, Lines breached, the month's downtime and Faults reported. Then come the open outages, Lines this month with breached lines first, and the month's outages.

The claim file#

A claim file is a spreadsheet for one line and one month: a row per outage with the line, circuit ID, account number, SLA, availability, allowance and whether the month was breached on every row, so a supplier's claim form can be filled from one sheet.

• Press Claim file beside a month on the line's Outages tab or beside a line on Outages and SLA.
• Export the month on Outages and SLA gives every line's month in one file.

Both come as CSV or Excel, and each export is recorded in the audit log.

Raise a fault#

1. Find the outage, on the line's Outages tab or on Outages and SLA, and press Raise a fault.
2. The fault desk shows the Fault line to call, the Fault email and the Supplier portal, from the line or else from the supplier.
3. What they will ask for lists the Circuit ID, Account number, Site address, Public addresses, when it started and how long it has lasted, each with a copy button, followed by Traceroutes from the site with Copy the traceroutes.
4. Under Raise it choose what to do:
   • Open a ticket for the customer. The ticket is linked to the line's router and is not emailed to the customer. Raising again uses the same ticket.
   • Email the supplier's fault desk. The subject and message are filled in from the email template; change them for this email if you like. The circuit, the times, what monitoring sees and the traceroutes follow your message.
   • Both. The email goes from the ticket, so the supplier's replies land on the ticket and quote its reference.
5. Press Open the ticket, Email the supplier or Open the ticket and email.

The outage then shows when and to whom it was reported. Type the supplier's reference on the outage when they give you one.

The wording comes from the Fault report to a line's supplier template in Settings > Support email, on the Email templates tab. Edit it once to match how you write to suppliers.

Settings#

Settings > Telephony, under Outages and SLA, sets how long a drop or a degraded spell must last to be kept, whether LAN faults and power cuts are left out of the SLA, whether degraded time counts against it, whether a whole site going quiet opens an outage, and how far before an outage the traceroutes are kept from. Most can be set per customer.