Analytics is all about driving better strategic and operational decisions. This means conferencing administrators will want to share insights from VQ Conference Manager with colleagues in the organization, or combine conferencing data with other information.
Data from VQ Conference Manager’s Analytics platform can be exported, either in its raw form as a CSV or PDF file, or a PDF of any of the visualizations.
It can also be linked directly to other business intelligence tools, either via the Elastic API, or using the optional SQL connector.*
* Optional Elastic Enterprise Stack Subscription license
Enterprise-grade services demand enterprise-grade analytics tools. VQ Conference Manager’s Analytics is built on the Elastic stack, and optimized to run fast, even with very large unified communications datasets.
Elastic spends huge amounts on research and development every year – in FY 2021 the total was close to $200 million. Its analytics tools are trusted by globally known organizations in telecoms, technology, aerospace, broadcasting, financial services and government.
With VQ Conference Manager, you get access to these same robust tools, giving you broad and deep insights into how your unified communications service is operating and being used.
Tuned for performance
The VQ Conference Manager Analytics platform has been optimized to perform exceptionally fast, even with the very large datasets produced by global, enterprise-scale unified communications systems.
Single-vendor simplicity
And because the Elastic-based Analytics package is part of the single VQ Conference Manager virtual machine installation, it is pre-installed and ready-to-use. Your administrators don’t need to spend time integrating and maintaining it separately.
In VQ Conference Manager 3.9 we introduced a completely fresh Analytics experience…..
Real-time summary
A new high-level overview dashboard gives administrators a real-time summary of your unified communications system, including the number of:
• Active meetings
• Participants in calls
• Online and offline call bridges
Timelines and drill-down opportunities
In addition, it contains timeline views of key historical data, covering the central pillars of your conferencing service:
• Meetings/Spaces
• Participants and endpoints
• Tenants
• Call bridges
The timelines are designed to convey the core insights administrators will need in an intuitive way. They also include drill-down capabilities, enabling administrators to explore the data in greater depth.
For example, the Meeting timeline provides a quick overview of when calls took place. Drill down first to see the individual calls, and then to see the timeline of each call, including when participants joined and left, as well as the quality of their in-call experience, based on levels of packet loss.
You’ll also find tables of the data behind each visualization.
Documentation
There’s comprehensive documentation on the available data and how to use it. Administrators can access this from within the VQ Conference Manager Analytics platform.
Legacy dashboards still available
The Kibana dashboards available in VQ Conference Manager up to version 3.8 are still available, for administrators who wish to continue using them.
VQ Conference Manager’s Kibana Analytics platform comes with pre-defined dashboards that include around 100 visualizations.
These have been developed to address real-world customer needs, and give you a variety of insights into the usage and performance of your conferencing service.
These can be used to troubleshoot, understand usage trends, demonstrate ROI and proactively plan for the future. Drill-down capability enables your teams to explore the visualized data in greater depth, if needed.
The dashboards include:
Usage pattern dashboard: A management-level report showing service usage levels and trends over time
Cisco Meeting Server dashboard: Real-time operational insights into your CMS usage, including bandwidth consumption, processor load and license consumption
Participants dashboard: Insights into your call participants, including your top users by call time, the devices they’re using and disconnect reasons
Spaces dashboard: See how many active meeting Spaces you have, understand how they’re being used and which are the most-used
Users dashboard: Identify who is making greatest use of the system, which departmental cost code they belong to and more
Tenants dashboard: Understand how different tenants on your Cisco Meeting Server are using the system
Operations dashboard: A troubleshooting tool for operators and administrators, including an alarms dashboard, Space-participant listings and audit records
In addition to these dashboards, your administrators can create their own custom dashboards.
The out-of-the-box dashboards included with VQ Conference Manager provide many of the insights you’ll need.
Administrators can create additional visualizations using the Kibana Lens drag-and-drop tooling, and access these directly through VQ Conference Manager’s Analytics.
Full documentation around the available data in VQ Conference Manager is included within the Analytics platform. And if you’d like to create more-sophisticated visualizations, please contact us and one of our data team will be happy to assist.
The out-of-the-box dashboards included with VQ Conference Manager provide many of the insights you’ll need.
In addition, VQ Conference Manager enables your administrators to create custom dashboards and reports. To support this, the software includes a set of templates to accelerate the process.
VQCM 3.6 introduces a refined Kibana UI and the new Lens visualization tool which simplifies creating your Kibana visualizations.
Where call data records give call-level information, VQ Conference Manager also collects a broader set of system data.
This covers:
• The operating system
• Kubernetes
• The VQ Conference Manager NGINX web server
• VQ Conference Manager
• Cisco Meeting Server syslogs
• Cisco Expressway syslogs
• Cisco Expressway metric data (including CPU load, memory utilization and network loading)
• More coming soon, including Cisco Unified Communications Manager, session border controllers, and Skype for Business software-defined network
These insights give your administrators and operators a wider and more in-depth understanding of the state of your full conferencing platform at any given time.
VQ Conference Manager collects call data record (CDR) events from your Cisco Meeting Server(s) and Cisco Expressway infrastructure* to create comprehensive, human-readable CDRs.
These CDRs show:
• Who called who
• When the call took place
• Call duration
• Video and audio codecs
• Video geometry
• The type of device each participant was using
• The type of Space used
• Each user’s role within the Space
• Any alarm conditions that triggered (such as packet loss)
• Which tenant the Space belongs to
• Space and participant cost codes (if applicable)
• Which Cisco Meeting Server hosted the call
• Detailed call information from Expressway
These insights can be explored via one of the ready-made dashboards included with VQ Conference Manager, or used to create your own reports and dashboards. You can configure how long the VQ Conference Manager CDRs are stored for.
Analytics is all about driving better strategic and operational decisions. This means your conferencing administrators will want to share insights from VQ Conference Manager with others in the organization, or combine conferencing data with other data.
Data from VQ Conference Manager’s Analytics platform can be exported, either as a CSV file or as a PDF. It can also be linked directly to other business intelligence tools, using an optional connector.
Requires the optional Elastic Subscription pack license
