Checklist: How to Make Your Annual Video Conferencing Reports Stress-Free

“Get those annual summaries for all of our communication technologies to me by end of day today.”

― Your Boss

“If all the year were playing holidays; to sport would be as tedious as to work.”

― William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part 1

 

Chances are you’re already running a number of reports to assess adoption, utilization, and other topics of interest to your management. The end of the year is a good time to assess a number of areas of your network that might not be among those analyses. What follows are a few reports you should consider running, if you’re not already, to help you assess 2016 and prepare for 2017.

Note: For all of these reports, you will want to set your date range to the desired period, presumably all of 2016.

Report: Video Bridging Utilization by Video Technology

This will let you see at a glance the growth or trend in overall bridge usage, but also identify which bridges are now carrying the largest portion of your load.

  1. Open Vyopta’s Historical Analytics module
  2. Go to the Adoption Tab
  3. Locate or add the Bridge Technology Usage Trend chart
  4. Select date resolution (organizing by month will reduce the noise)

Bridge Technology Usage Trend

Even in a somewhat random video network like ours, where usage levels are highly influenced by software testing (in the above we have deselected both MCU and RMX bridges as they only host test calls on our network), trends are noticeable; chances are that your usage patterns will be even more definitive.

Report: Video Endpoint (Codec) Utilization

You may be already using one of our Top/Bottom Ten panels to track this on an ongoing basis, but the end of year is a good time to dive a bit deeper and determine which of your endpoints might be getting a little dusty from lack of use.

  1. Open Vyopta’s Historical Analytics module
  2. Go to the Endpoints tab, and click on the Managed submenu
  3. Click on the Total Calls column to sort in ascending order (lowest number of calls first)

How to report on video endpoint and codec use

You can also use the filtering capability criteria to further refine the picture for you as needed, or the model selection dropdown to focus on, say, group/immersive endpoints or perhaps unused personal models.

Report: Cisco WebEx Host Utilization (Analytics for WebEx users only)

Similar to above, it’s a good idea to see if you have some WebEx accounts/CMRs that are going unused.

  1. Open Vyopta’s Analytics for Cisco WebEx
  2. Go to the Dashboard tab
  3. Locate or add the Host Activity panel

Video conferencing meeting host activity chart

You can then click on the No Meetings bar to bring up the licensed Cisco WebEx hosts who have not actually hosted a meeting for the previous year.

Report: Call Quality/Dialing Issues/Security

The Call Status chart is often an eye-opener, revealing many more “Not Connected” calls than one would typically expect.

  1. Open Vyopta’s Historical Analytics module
  2. Go to the Issues tab
  3. Find or add the Call Status panel

Video call quality, dialing issues, and security

Selecting the Not Connected section of the donut chart will bring you to a list of these calls. A quick look will likely reveal that many of these source caller and target caller addresses are suspect. They are most likely failed attempts to dial into your video network by various SIP bots or hackers intent on hijacking your UC network for toll fraud. The good news is that if the Status is Not Connected, your search rules, policies, and other UC edge security measures are functioning successfully.

Video endpoint and codec call details report

Additional details can be found on this Call Details page. For example, you can select the connection failure issue by using drop-down Disconnect Reasons filter. The most common reasons are No Route To Destination or Callee Not Found. It’s possible to get these error codes from a simple misdial, but a large volume of calls in these categories will typically indicate unauthorized attempts to dial into or through your UC network. So these metrics can be helpful in pinpointing sources of the calls, adding these to deny lists or instituting other security policies that further impede these would-be hackers.

Scheduling and Sending Reports 

Learn how to schedule and send reports automatically so you never have to waste time again. 

Best practices for managing a video conferencing network

Have Questions?

We’re always available at www.vyopta.com/support to answer any questions.

Thanks for reading! Let us know if you have some “go-to” panels or reports of your own that help you keep on top of your UC environment. We would love to hear from you!