Monitor the operational status of a Zylinc solution, part 3
In this post (the third of six in the series), we’ll look at the Linux-based Zylinc Media Server, and which services you should monitor on it.
Background: Many organizations want to be able to monitor how their critical IT and communications solutions perform, so that they can quickly deal with any potential problems before many users become affected. If you work in IT operations or a similar function, and your organization uses Zylinc, this blog series is for you. It covers what you need to know if you’re going to monitor the operational status of a Zylinc solution.
If you read the last post in this series, you learned what the Zylinc Media Server does, and that it runs on Debian Linux. You can use the tool AdminCLI (which comes with the Zylinc solution) to set up the Media Server’s features, but you don’t have root access to the underlying operating system.
Anyway, the Media Server provides two important services that you should monitor:
- Asterisk: A SIP-based PBX (telephone exchange) service that handles calls to phone queues, and makes it possible for callers to hear music on hold and audio announcements (like “You will be served by the next available representative; please hold …”). Asterisk also makes it possible for callers to use IVR menus (Interactive Voice Response, like “For Sales, press 1”), and many other things like that.
- Tomcat: A web server that hosts the browser-based Zylinc Administration Portal and provides access to log file downloads as well as upload and download of audio announcement files.
Each of those services should listen on their respective network ports, so you should monitor that those ports respond:
Asterisk ports to monitor:
Tcp/5038
Tomcat ports to monitor:
Tcp/8080
Tcp/8443 (if you use HTTPS)
On the Debian Linux server itself, you should consider monitoring disk space, memory usage, CPU usage, and the state of time synchronization. To set up monitoring of the Debian Linux server, refer to your organization’s guidelines or to the documentation of VMware and your preferred monitoring tool.
If you use VMware to host the Media Server, we recommend that you install VMware tools, because they give you some advanced monitoring features.
Hyper-V Linux Integration Services or other third-party agents are currently not supported on the Media Server. Instead, you can set up monitoring via SNMP.
We describe SNMP monitoring, as well as how to install the VMware tools that I mentioned before, in detail on Zylinc unified help. If you get a sign-up page when you access the link, simply fill in the sign-up form, and my colleagues in Zylinc’s admin office will give you access quickly.
The next post in this blog series will be about monitoring relevant Windows services. Here’s an overview of the rest of the series:
- Monitor relevant Windows services
- Monitor relevant Tomcat services on Windows
- Monitor SQL Server availability