Telephony alerts

The site probe, the outside checks and the phone system connections measure. Telephony alerts decide what is worth telling you. They are ordinary Tenvara alerts, so they follow your alert rules, notifications and on-call. See Alerts.

Every alert says what raised it and links to it: the line, the site's Connectivity tab, the phone service or the phone system.

The alerts and their defaults#

The phone system alerts come from a phone system you have connected with the customer's own account. See Connecting a phone system.

A few things keep the noise down:

• A failover is one warning. When a site moves to its backup line you get "on backup", not also a critical line-down for the primary. The site is still online.
• One alert however long it lasts. While a problem continues, the same alert is kept up to date. Nobody is told again unless it gets worse.
• "For 10 minutes" means it. Loss, jitter and MOS alerts need measurements in most of the minutes and every one of them over the limit. Once open, the alert stays until the average is back under, so one good minute does not close it.
• A dead line is not "loss". A minute that lost half its pings is the line down, which is the outage's job.
• The same numbers as the screens. Loss and jitter use the site probe's degraded limits, speed uses the speed test settings, and the days and poor MOS are the call quality settings. A line that shows degraded alerts on the same figures.

Alerts clear by themselves when the problem has gone. A phone system that cannot be read keeps what it last said open until it can be read again.

Changing severity and timing#

Open Settings > Telephony and find Alerts.

• Each alert's severity can be off, information, warning or critical.
• The minutes (how long a line must be down, how long loss, jitter or poor quality must last) are settings too, with An extension that should stay registered is off for longer than (15 minutes) and the overall share of extensions for the optional warning. Which extensions should stay registered is set on each phone system's Extensions tab: see Connecting a phone system.

These are settings with customer overrides, so you can set a default for everyone and a different value for one customer: for example a critical "on backup" alert for a customer whose backup is a metered 4G line, or no jitter alert for a site with no VoIP. See The settings catalogue and overrides.

Onboarding and storms#

Every telephony alert names its customer, so the usual protections apply:

• A customer in onboarding or takeover mode gathers its alerts as findings in one report in place of paging anyone. See Onboarding mode and going live.
• Too many alerts at one customer at once form a storm, with one notification. See Storms and first-run findings.

The regional outage alert#

Storms are per customer, so they cannot help when twenty customers each lose one line to the same provider. Telephony has its own rule for that.

Lines are grouped by their upstream provider: the supplier the line is bought from, or else the provider name you typed. When one provider's lines go down at three customers within 15 minutes of each other, Tenvara opens one critical alert for the provider. Each customer's line-down or on-backup alert is held under it, and customers whose alert opened just before the outage was recognised are moved under it too.

The regional alert stays open while lines are still down at two or more of those customers. When it resolves, any customer still down after a short grace period is alerted in their own right.

Tip: The grouping only works if lines from the same provider carry the same supplier or the same provider name. Pick suppliers from the list where you can, and keep typed provider names consistent.

The number of customers and the minutes are settings in Settings > Telephony.

Home blocks and TV widgets#

Two blocks show the state of every customer at a glance. Press Customise on Home to add them:

• Sites on backup now: each site running on its backup line and since when, longest first. With nothing on backup it says every site is on its primary line.
• Trunks down: each phone system with a trunk not registered and since when. With none it says every trunk is registered.

Both are honest about what is watched. With no backup lines recorded, or no phone systems connected, the block says so, never an all-clear.

The same two are available as widgets for TV dashboards, and on a screen set to one customer they show that customer only. See TV dashboards.

The blocks are hidden from anyone without the module's permission.

Usage alerts#

Call spend over normal, premium and international calls that look like toll fraud, and carrier bills that do not match the records are a separate set of alerts with their own settings. See Call usage and toll-fraud alerts.