Impact Technologies

Focus on Call Trends: A Lens into Abnormalities

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0500

In a previous blog, we delved into the valuable insights that basic call trends can provide. However, as you closely monitor these trends, you might notice occasional spikes and irregularities. These anomalies warrant further investigation to determine their underlying causes. Are they business-driven fluctuations, or do they signal potential issues like routing glitches, inbound hacking attempts or fraud?

A sudden surge in inbound call volume could be a direct response to a recently launched marketing campaign. Customers, eager to capitalize on a new deal, flood the lines. On the flip side, inclement weather or unexpected service outages may trigger an influx of calls to customer service. Outbound calling campaigns orchestrated by the sales team can also cause call volume spikes. Whether planned (sales campaign) or unplanned (service outage), these spikes align with business operations.

Other spikes may indicate a problem, such as a configuration error or a robocall threat. As an example, the chart below shows the hourly trend for call terminations based on the clearing cause code provided by the switch platform. In “typical” hours, this client had less than 100 calls, then suddenly in the 11 AM hour on July 5 there was a spike of 1,589 calls.

The graphic below shows a subset of the call log for this hour, with numbers hidden for privacy. Drilling into the call detail, it shows that the same originating number was constantly pumping inbound calls into the enterprise. You can see calls every few seconds and at times multiple calls in the same second. The called numbers are not assigned on the switch so the “Unassigned Number” clearing cause is assigned.

As another example, the chart below shows a client that typically has approximately 600 calls per hour. Then suddenly in the 1 PM hour on January 5 there was a peak of over 4,000 calls. Similar to above scenario, this started as spam calls to a number in the client’s DID range. However, since the number was not configured in the home directory number table, the switch re-routed that call out to telco. Then the telco received the call and routed it back in as a new call and the cycle continued. The client saw up to 10 B-channels tied up from a single incoming call. By seeing this spike, the fix was to ensure every DID number is in the home directory number table.

Configuring call routing tables can be tedious. Enterprises would love to have nice, clean blocks of thousands of numbers, but in reality, that just does not often happen. Choppy number blocks and sophisticated routing plans can create a looping calls scenario as above. So, here is another example where data analytics can turn your raw data into actionable intelligence to manage your daily operations and improve network performance.

Do you know how many intrusion attempts are hitting your network? Do you know if your network had a significant spike this week like above customer examples? Are you missing key routing logic in your switch that might be costing you financially and/or consuming your call channels and dramatically impacting your call performance? As you analyze your call data, keep a keen eye on these spikes. Confirm their origin—whether they stem from strategic business decisions or unforeseen circumstances. By understanding the driving forces behind call fluctuations, you can optimize your response, enhance customer experience and ensure efficient call management.

Clearly See Your Call Trends and Performance with Optic

Optic for Voice Networks™ will give you a clear view into your network’s usage, trending and performance, both from high level trending dashboards to the ability to search for specific calls and see detailed metrics. Visibility will help you improve Total Caller Experience^® and streamline system administration. Contact us today to learn more about proactively monitoring your voice network and gaining seamless visibility across your entire voice network activity and performance.

Gain a Forensic View of Your Network Utilization

Thu, 15 Feb 2024 07:00:00 -0600

When PBXs first hit the market, manufacturers told companies to buy one trunk for every four phones. Obviously too simplistic to apply across all vertical markets and companies, so the age of traffic studies was born. It was all about busy hours and trying to pick the right timeframe to run the studies.

Since those days, the introduction of technologies such as cellphones, texting, VoIP, SIP and web collaboration have rewritten the world of network performance management. Today, you have the option to be proactive and make true engineering decisions based on your company’s unique collaboration network. No longer do you have to sit back and wait for periodic traffic studies or let your telecom provider tell you how much capacity you need. Empower yourself and your organization with the right methodologies and tools!

This blog is not meant to have all the answers, but hopefully it will get you moving and thinking to transform your business processes for network performance monitoring and capacity planning.
Visibility is everyone’s favorite marketing term these days. But look past the fluff and it is real. You do need (and can have) complete visibility to your voice network data. You need to have the data at your fingertips every day to optimize your network performance. How can you optimize anything if you don’t have visibility into real-time and historical usage trends? Reading this now, can you answer these questions:

Is my network running at 35% utilization, 95% utilization or somewhere in between?
Have any calls been blocked or dropped today?
What is the maximum number of concurrent call paths this month?

Trend analysis and data decomposition can expose the root cause of current and impending service issues along with providing the basis for accurate capacity planning and network design.

Usage & Trend Analysis

Start with a high-level picture to capture cyclical patterns in calls and usage carried over all your network facilities. View trends broken out by incoming, outgoing and total traffic as the Year over Year monthly example below highlights. You can quickly understand the months that drive higher or lower traffic volumes. Viewing trends by enterprise and drilling down to individual voice servers or trunk groups or routes along with weekly and daily trends will be insightful too.

Data Decomposition
But there is so much more than just call counts and usage hours to consider! Data decomposition depicts how well your network resources are supporting desired call activity versus how much capacity is being consumed servicing failed or fraudulent activity. Views like example below highlight these trends and percentages. A Normal Call Resolution indicates the call completed as expected with one of the parties hanging up. All other conditions may indicate some type of failure in the call process. In this example, over 20% of monthly call capacity in July and August was some type of Equipment Failures. And, dropped calls started to spike in August. User can quickly drill into detail to troubleshoot. Ideally, if you are proactively monitoring, these types of failed calls would not continue for months.

Capacity Planning
As you understand your usage trends and the data decomposition of valid versus failed or fraudulent calls, you can understand if you are paying for capacity that is not servicing valid calls. You are at risk of extreme oversubscription. And, yes, that translates directly to money right down the drain. Given that your network most likely started with extra capacity and now add in all the new communication technologies, it is very likely that your existing network has excessive capacity. How many times recently have you sent a text instead of picking up a phone? Don’t let some SIP provider convince you that you need to spend way too much for capacity you don’t need. Use your own historical data and a good analytical tool to find your own answers.

Peak Percent Utilization
To dig into your capacity utilization, start by looking into peak percent utilization. Whether PRI or SIP circuits, do you know the peak percent utilization for today, or this month or the past 12 months? Like this example, maybe you have some facilities that are hitting 100% and may be blocking calls but most of your network facilities have a lot of excess capacity that is not being used.

This high-level view has value, but additional insight is gained by drilling into detail. You will want to be able to see the utilization by hour trending. Quickly note any trends or aberrations in activity that may account for elevated peak utilization. Or confirm if your current capacity is too much or not enough. In the example below, the peak capacity consistently remained around 50-60% with the exception of the 100% spike on December 6. Was that spike driven by the business (a marketing campaign or service outage to generate calls) or maybe an inbound hacking attempt? If not “real”, this could indicate a potential opportunity for savings by decreasing channel capacity.

Concurrent Call Paths
Knowing your network’s channel usage is critical data for contract negotiation and management of both equipment and network service providers. By seeing your usage trends and capacity thresholds, you can decide if flat rate, burstable or a blend of both is optimal for your unique network and budget. To begin to understand how you can eliminate over-subscription to drive down service provider costs and system maintenance fees, let’s look at concurrent call paths (CCP) analytics. The first chart below illustrates the maximum channels per day for one network that is fairly consistent around 20 channels with some obvious spikes. Maybe a blend of flat rate with burstable increases for days if the spikes of usage are driven by business activities is the best plan in this scenario.

The second example is much less consistent. In many cases, it is inbound hacking call attempts with hundreds or thousands of very short calls that drive the spikes you may see in CCP like the August 16 spike below. Again, you would want to drill down to the details to determine what is behind the abnormal behavior.

Networks are dynamic. To transform your network management and create optimum resourcing designs and strategies, you need visibility into your current and historical usage, performance and capacity metrics. Check back again soon for the next post on troubleshooting some of those abnormal call spikes.

Clearly See Your Voice Network Activity and Performance with Optic
Optic for Voice Networks™ will give you a clear view into your network’s usage, trending and performance, both from high level trending dashboards to the ability to search for specific calls and see detailed metrics. Visibility will help you improve caller experience, mitigate service risks and improve the cost performance of your voice network. Contact us today to learn more about proactively monitoring your voice network and gaining seamless visibility across your entire voice network activity and performance.

Discover the Hidden Insights in Your Data

Mon, 29 Jan 2024 08:00:00 -0600

In our previous blog, we discussed starting your collaboration network analysis with basic call trends. Do you know how many calls are processed in your network each hour? Any idea how many calls complete normally versus fail each day? How many calls dropped yesterday? Do you know the busy days or what traffic load your enterprise has in off hours? This blog will highlight some examples of basic call trend analytics and the vital information you can discover.

In general, if you think about what you expect a graph of the hourly call counts in your enterprise to look like, it might be something like the example below. This shows hourly call trends for five days, starting on Thursday and running through Monday afternoon. Typical pattern for many customers with call counts building in the mornings, maybe a dip in the lunch hour and then dropping off to small numbers overnight and on weekends.

However, we know that there are not often “typical” patterns in our world of collaboration network management! Below are snapshots from three real customer networks. Each shows the hourly call trends for five days. For each customer, there are two different charts presented with the first showing a Friday through Tuesday afternoon in December and the second representing a Thursday through Monday afternoon in January. Do you know which one might look most like your enterprise?

For the first customer, you will notice a pattern of around 400 calls/hour during business hours with very little weekend traffic for the week in December. The call volumes increased to approximately 500 – 600 calls/hour for days in the January chart. Back to work after the holidays!

These charts not only show the normal calls that were setup and completed as expected, but they also highlight how other calls failed to setup initially or were terminated unexpectedly. Examples include barred by policy, dropped calls or calls that were “threats,” basically representing inbound call hacking attempts. For this customer, the light purple line clearly shows spikes of calls throughout the day for both weeks for “Party Not Available” cases. Is it OK that there are that many calls not being answered? And why would there be that huge spike on Saturday night, January 6?

Customer two illustrates a completely different trend. Note that there are dips in traffic in overnight hours but clearly lots of weekend traffic. This customer typically has a peak call rate around 600 calls/hour. Note this customer has very few failed or non-normal calls. A very “clean” network until that huge spike of “Party Not Available” calls on Friday, January 5. With the ability to monitor this trend, this customer was quickly able to identify the source of the problem (a routing error) and address it.

The final customer example again shows more traditional weekday call trends with low traffic on weekend days. This customer traditionally has less than 150 calls/hour but there are three very notable spikes of threats in the December week highlighted by the orange line. These are calls that are inbound to the network with a call resolution of “Called Number Failure” based on the clearing cause code assigned by the switch. In most cases, these represent inbound call hacking attempts. Is your network experiencing any spikes like this? There is also a spike of over 250 calls in an hour that were not answered on December 18. For this customer those hacking attempts and unanswered calls continued to spike as the new year started.

So, how does your network compare? How many calls on your network are failing to even setup? Is it a small percentage of your total calls or not? Are calls dropping throughout the day? Are you using subjective measurements like trouble tickets created to track issues? The right forensic tools will give you visibility into usage trends but will also speed trouble identification and resolution throughout your network. Come back soon for the next post to dig in deeper to analytics for transforming your network management and capacity planning process.

Clearly See Your Call Trends and Performance with Optic
Optic for Voice Networks™ will give you a clear view into your network’s usage, trending and performance, both from high level trending dashboards to the ability to search for specific calls and see detailed metrics. Visibility will help you improve caller experience and streamline system administration. Contact us today to learn more about proactively monitoring your voice network and gaining seamless visibility across your entire voice network activity and performance.

Unleash the Power of Your Data with Basic Call Trends

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 08:00:00 -0600

Almost every day we are on the lookout for trends. Is the financial market up today? Who is trending on social media? Did I gain or lose a pound this morning? But have you thought about the trends that are critical to managing your voice communication network? As we start the journey to learn how data analytics can transform collaboration network management, this post starts with the basic insights into trends to watch to manage and optimize your collaboration environment.

Are short-term or long-term trends important? Both! In some cases, you can simply look at data for the current day. But other times your management team may want to view trends for the past 12 months or even compare year over year trends for the past several years. And, for resource or capacity planning purposes, it is important to have insight into trends based on day of week, or month of year or other cyclical drivers in your business. For instance, if you are an insurance company with registration deadlines in October, how does that impact call volumes? Or, if you are an educational institution, what happens over the summer break?

What are some of the trends to look for? It’s always a good approach to start with the basics and build. So, start with the most basic of simple call volumes. How many calls are carried on the network? But then you can break that out in a variety of views such as:

By direction (inbound, outbound, internal)
By call type (local, long distance, international, etc.)
By time (year, month, day, hour, day of week)
By organization hierarchy (location, department, cost center, etc.)
By key numbers (pilot numbers, hunt groups, voice mail, conference bridges, etc.)

What trends can actually help manage my voice network? We will dig into these more in future posts, but for a quick introduction, here are some suggestions.

Call failures. How many calls on your network are failing to even setup? Is it a small percentage of your total calls or not? Are calls dropping throughout the day?
Audio quality. Do you know if the quality your callers are experience is getting better or worse? How is it today? Are there certain devices that experience more problems than other devices? Maybe a certain codec is causing more problems than others? Or, maybe it is a particular IP address range that is the issue?
Concurrent Call Paths (CCP). Are you trying to optimize your network financial investment and create the right balance between paying for more channel capacity versus blocking calls? Viewing your trends for CCP is the answer.
And, of course, seeing trends is beneficial but often those trends highlight spikes and abnormalities. Can you explain those? Were they driven by the business? Or are those indicators of potential issues like inbound hacking attempts or fraud?

With the new year starting, now is the time to start taking a look at your network trends. Check back soon for the next post to dig in deeper to leveraging data analytics for business transformation.

Leveraging Data Analytics for Business Transformation

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 13:39:00 -0600

Today’s collaboration networks have come a long way. In the not-too-distant past we managed our voice networks with periodic traffic studies and metrics like Busy Hours and Erlangs. Now we have an explosion of new acronyms (VoIP, SIP, MOS, CCP to name a few) and demands for more answers and analytics, faster and honed to wide variety of business users. It’s not just the network technician that wants or needs analytics for your collaboration network. Your C-suite and operational business managers are demanding visibility too. The business motivations are all different, but employees throughout your organization are expecting you to take those CDR, QoS records and more and convert them into the business intelligence they need to manage their operations – one department or the entire enterprise.

This is the first blog in a series that will dive into how to leverage data analytics for business transformation enablement. Business transformation is all about making fundamental changes in how a business or organization runs. The list of drivers is extensive and could include any of the following or others:

Improve customer satisfaction
Increase revenue
Cut costs
Increase efficiency & productivity
More productivity

The term “business transformation” may be relatively new but the concept is not. History has many examples, such as IBM changing business with mainframes or Henry Ford with advances in automobile manufacturing. So if you expect this blog series to outline some new-fangled business methodology, you will be disappointed. But if instead you seek to understand how to get started on the right path with the decomposition of your voice network data to be smarter and more effective with the data you have to drive business results … well then, you’re in the exact right place.

Business transformation is most likely already being used throughout your enterprise and now CxOs are looking at the telecom department to follow suit. Our leadership’s vision and goals cannot be tied to erlangs and busy hours in 2024. There needs to be KPIs, analytics and objectives that can be identified, understood, measured and monitored from the C-suite to the technician in the field. But what are they? There is not a ‘one size fits all’ answer as clearly analytics and objectives vary to some degree based on enterprise environment, but this blog series will investigate some general concepts and possibilities to consider.

What data and trends should you be looking at? What are the considerations and key metrics for your NOC technicians, network architects, executives, department managers and security team to turn raw data into actionable intelligence to transform and manage their daily operations and achieve strategic goals? How do you align C-suite strategies to team members’ daily tasks? What data analytics can you stack to measure and maximize your transformation progress? Check back soon for the next post to start your journey to learn how data analytics can transform collaboration network management.

Proactively Monitor Voice Network Audio Quality

Wed, 01 Mar 2023 10:12:00 -0600

Once a call is connected, the goal is not accomplished. The next challenge becomes audio quality. Are you able to quickly identify devices in your network that are experiencing quality issues? Or, if someone is complaining of poor quality, can you confirm the problem?

Choose Your View of Audio Quality
Metrics like MOS, latency, packet loss and jitter help identify devices in your network that are experiencing quality issues so you can diagnose the source of the problem and correct it. But, where do you begin? Having the flexibility to slice and dice audio quality visibility how you choose—by IP address, extension, device type, codec or even call path—is a good starting point. Let’s take a quick peek at a few of these options, starting with by IP address.

By IP Address
A chart like Audio Quality by IP Address & Subnetworks below highlights audio quality performance by device IP address and subnetworks for a defined time period. This showcases devices and domains that are performing well across the enterprise while also indicating which devices and networks have poor call quality scores. The three charts show the top fifteen (15) entities based on number of connections.

In the search for problem areas, you will want to be able to filter the data set to select only marginal and poor audio quality options to quickly see the devices with the most problems during a selected time interval.

To troubleshoot, you can drill down to see the call detail so you can discern if the driver of the problem is packet loss, jitter and/or latency. And you can determine if the problem is restricted to a set of IP addresses and/or date ranges.

By Codec
Another interesting view into audio quality is by codec. You can highlight audio quality performance by codec to showcase the codecs that are performing well across the enterprise while also indicating which codecs have poor call quality scores. Charts like below display trending by voice server/switch so can identify trends and quickly spot any anomalies. Clearly G7.111 codecs are showing higher quality performance than G.729 options.

By Voice Server by Month
As mentioned above, trending analytics can be very insightful. A higher level perspective is simply by voice server by month. A quick glance can show the trends over time by switch platform. Maybe you have a particular problem with one of your platforms.

By Extension
If a specific caller in your organization is complaining about call quality or if you want to proactively validate the caller experience for specific extensions within your organization (such as executives or call center agents), the ability to quickly search by extension is critical. Leveraging dashboard filters to pinpoint your search criteria for date ranges, phone numbers and/or quality ratings makes the task much more efficient than trying to decipher raw record files.

Clearly See Your Audio Quality Performance with Optic
Optic for Voice Networks™ gives you a clear view into your network’s audio quality performance, both from high level trending dashboards to the ability to search for specific calls and see detailed QoS metrics. Contact us today to learn more about proactively monitoring the audio quality in your voice network and gaining seamless visibility across your entire voice network activity and performance.

Put Number Management Via Excel Spreadsheets Behind You

Fri, 28 Oct 2022 10:00:00 -0500

The solution Impact customers love for total voice network visibility and deep call forensics also offers a user-friendly, centralized solution for managing your number ranges across your voice and collaboration platforms.

We kept hearing our customers state that they were tired of trying to manage DID numbers in excel spreadsheets. Or, they couldn’t believe the price tag for a number management system. We listened!

Optic for Voice Networks™ offers you a centralized solution for number inventory management. And, not just DID numbers, but you can also track non-DID numbers. And the best part, there is no additional charge! It’s part of the core Full Stack solution. Easily track and report number status, such as In Use, On Hold, Reserved, Available and Aging. Leverage number management dashboards, place numbers on hold for user-defined number of days, quickly determine the which numbers are available to assign and much more. Put an end to your number management headaches and contact us today to learn more about Optic Number Management.

Get a View of Your Network Utilization

Wed, 26 Jan 2022 08:00:00 -0600

Optic’s Network Forensics gives you a comprehensive view of your network’s usage and performance with a clear vision of your network challenges and opportunities. Optic’s network traffic data decomposition and trend analysis expose the root cause of current and impending service issues along with providing the basis for accurate capacity planning and network design. Optic lets you see your network your way to quickly assess metrics for call counts, hours of usage, peak utilization and more to mitigate service risks and improve the cost performance of your voice network.

Usage & Trend Analysis
There are a variety of dashboards to view your network usage trends, but let’s start with a high-level picture. The Network Year over Year Call Trends dashboard captures cyclical patterns in calls and usage carried over all your network facilities. View trends broken out by incoming, outgoing and total traffic. By toggling between month and week views, you can quickly understand the months and weeks that drive higher or lower traffic volumes. The example displays entire enterprise but you can quickly filter for individual voice servers or trunk groups or routes.

If you prefer a table view to see call counts, Optic has you covered. The Network Calls Summary dashboard shows seizure counts by entity (trunk group or route). You can quickly identify network entities that have high call volumes or problems with call failures.

Data Decomposition
Optic’s data decomposition depicts how well your network resources are supporting desired call activity versus how much capacity is being consumed servicing failed or fraudulent activity. Dashboards such as Trunk Group Performance Summary quickly highlight these trends and percentages. A Normal Call Resolution indicates the call completed as expected with one of the parties hanging up. All other conditions may indicate some type of failure in the call process. In this example, up to 25% of monthly calls were Called Number Failures. User can quickly drill into daily detail to uncover trends or abnormal spikes in activity.

Capacity Planning
As you understand your usage trends and the data decomposition of valid versus failed or fraudulent calls, Optic will help you understand if you are paying for capacity that is not servicing valid calls. To dig more into your capacity utilization, Optic offers options but let’s start by looking into peak percent utilization.

The Network Utilization dashboard highlights peak capacity for the last 30 days. The blue bar represents the number of channels currently configured while the diamond marks the maximum number of channels used during the report period. The peak percent channel utilization is also included. In this example, note the highest peak percentage was only 40%. For this timeframe, it appears the network has a lot of capacity that is not being used.

The high-level view has value, but additional insight is gained by drilling into detail. By clicking on a blue bar, see the utilization by hour trending. Quickly note any trends or aberrations in activity that may account for elevated peak utilization. Or confirm if your current capacity is too much or not enough. In the example below, the peak capacity consistently remained under 40 percent and could indicate a potential for savings by disconnecting circuits. You can use the filter to expand the date range to assure you have a complete picture before implementing capacity changes.

As you are starting a SIP migration or continuing to manage your SIP or hybrid network, knowing your network’s channel usage is critical data for contract negotiation and management of both equipment and network service providers. By seeing your usage trends and capacity thresholds in Optic, you can decide if flat rate, burstable or a blend of both is optimal for your unique network and budget. To begin to understand how Optic can eliminate over-subscription to drive down service provider costs and system maintenance fees, let’s look at Optic’s Concurrent Call Paths (CCP) analytics.

The Network Concurrent Call Paths dashboard includes the “Maximum Channels in Use by Day” chart showcasing the maximum number of concurrent channels (or trunks) used at any point within a day across the enterprise. In many cases, it is inbound hacking call attempts with hundreds or thousands of very short calls that drive the spikes you may see in CCP. From the enterprise view, Optic offers analytics to highlight your network’s maximum number of concurrent call paths for an individual circuit or a voice communication server and then drill down to the details.

Networks are dynamic. Optic for Voice Networks gives you visibility into your current and historical usage, performance and capacity metrics. And with these analytics, Optic will help you create optimum resourcing designs and strategies. Contact us today to learn more about network monitoring and optimization and putting Optic to work for you.