sundance-communications.com/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems Avaya - Lucent Telephones & Systems newbie, 1st post...phone service question

First off, I am the network admin nad know just a little bit about phone systems. We run an IP Office 500 system. Periodically, our VM service fails and consequesntly, callers get a busy signal instead of our auto attendant. We recently subscribed to a web monitoring service to notify us when our website is unreachable. We would also like a similar service that will dial our phone numbers and notify us if there IS NOT a ring tone. We don't necessarily want it to listen to the auto attendant, but just check and make sure the line rings instead of ring busy. Am I way off base here? Is there such a beast out there? Thanks for your help

AP

If this problem is happening frequently, I would highly recommend getting the Avaya Business Partner who installed it out to troubleshoot the problem. Unlike Networks, phone systems are supposed to function 24/7 without being periodically rebooted. If your voicemail keeps crashing, find out why it is crashing and fix it rather than simply trying to find out if it has crashed so you can reboot.

I understand what you are saying. It does not fail frequently, but in the last 1.5 years, it has gone done 4 times. Plus, AT&T has cut our lines on a saturday once. Plus, our Logix PRI has gone done several times. It is a combination of issues that all could lead to a busy tone. Do you know if such a product that will detect a busy/ring tone?

Since this question is really about an IPO I'm moving this to the Avaya forum. We can continue it there.

-Hal

It sounds like you have more of an issue with your phone lines not working than the voice mail. In our office, we have regular phone lines in a single hunt group. The hunt group is programmed through the phone carrier so that it forwards to a cell phone - I believe it is a busy/no answer forward set on the last line of the hunt group. So, if there is a problem (no dialtone, no power, etc.), it rings to the cell phone, which tends to alerts us to check to see if there's a problem.

Again, it is a carrier feature, not a phone system feature. You could check with your phone carrier (AT&T, Verizon, One Communications, etc.) to see if that feature is available on your phone lines.

You are correct. It is not totally an issue with the VM system. It is partly and issue with the carrier, partly with our equipment and partly with our VM software. I am not concerned about the VM system using all it's resources and having to ring over to a cell phone. I am concerned with weekend and night issues. I am concerned also with middle of the day issues. I want a service that can call, check the status of our lines (ie: does it ring or is it busy), and report back via email if it was ringing busy. That will allow us to track it down. Perhaps AT&T cut our line. Perhaps our VM services are not running on the VM server. Perhaps all our VM channels are occupied. I just want the automated service to perform this. Is the question I am asking not making sense? Perhaps I do not know how to explain it correctly.. Perhaps what I am asking for is so far out in left field everyone thinks I am smoking bad dope...

Thanks

First off there is nothing that is going to go through you lines and tell you if they are not working. A number of things are going on here that preclude something like that. A line in trouble will not necessarily result in a busy. It may result in a ring no answer, hunt to another number or maybe nothing. You also apparently have pri.

Then you talk about your VM system failing.

So what is it that you are asking about?

-Hal

So it is clear that my question was not very clear. Our primary hunt group rings to a rollover hunt group, all of which are local employees working in our corporate office. Our primary number will NEVER ring busy, unless there is a problem either with the line itself or a problem with the VM server/system. I don't care where the problem is, whether it is a line issue, VM issue, etc...I want a service that will test and determine if our line is dialed, does it ring busy. If it rings busy, there is a problem. I will figure out what that problem is, I just want it to notify me at 2:00 am and let me know there IS a problem. We run a sales call center and knowing there is a problem with the phone line/system before 8:00 am is very helpful, especially when 40% of our business is via phone.
Everytime our phone lines have gone down (either because the local provider dug up our PRI, the AT&T line tech "accidentally" pulled our smart jack off the side of the building, our VM Pro services stop, etc...), they have ALWAYS rang busy for the customers. We are now global and need to know when our line is busy. Again, I will determine why it is busy, I just want to be notified by this piece of software/service that it indeed did just ring busy. It sounds as though I may be asking for the goose that lays the golden egg.

Well to be useful it would have to dial your line pretty frequently I would think. That would be irritating for the staff to be picking up calls only to get dead air. So dialing in would be useless if you only set it to check a couple times a day or night. What you need, and I am not aware of this existing, is a way to check the integrity of your outgoing call ability. Alarm systems often do this but I am not aware of phone systems that do.

It's probably alot more than what you may be looking for, but yes, such beasts exist in voice firewall platforms. Would real-time notification via email or pager be sufficient? Even though the application in the following link illustrates coverage for multiple PRI spans, the vendor also manufacturers appliances which cover from one to twelve individual lines per analog appliance using an RJ71C connection.

I still think it's way more that what you require, but here's a look, and make sure to scroll down to see how the platform and call monitor appears via the GUI interface. The real-time notification is briefly discussed under "features".. here.