Vendor checks - PBX Info :: Your Free PBX, PABX and Telephone Information Resource

Ancient1 · 09-25-2006, 07:44 AM

Long story short:
We have a vendor that is supposed to be monitoring our PBX and take care of any unusual problems. The crew here just does the add, move, changes stuff. Anything past that is the vendors job.

I saw something happen a while back in the midnight routines that was "different" but I / we had no idea what it meant. PBX was still working so it must not have been important. Recently I sent a copy of what I saw that was "different" to the vendor for an answer of what does it mean. After a couple of e-mails and a couple of weeks they sent a tech out. Turned out the T-1 for the long distance went down and they were not notified about this because the SEB had beed dead even longer. This tells me they have not even looked at the switch in a long time and definately not from remote.

After this T-1 was brought back up it took the vendor over another week to get an SEB in here to monitor the PBX. Really poor "service" if you ask me.

Anyway, back to the true question of all this. Since the vendor is telling us that we are now being monitored, I want to send them some alarms and see if they do respond.

I "could" go out and unplug the Long Distance T-1 and recreate the problem but what are the side-effects? When I plug it back in will it come back up or are there other things that have to be done.

Is there an easy ( and SAFE way ) to give the vendor a few alarms that do not affect the PBX preformance?

Any and all responses are welcome!! ( yes, I know the one about "get another vendor".... out of my hands

)

TIA!!

***John_In_Dakota*** · 09-25-2006, 08:27 AM

Well you could stat your T-1 and if it's all idle pull the T-1 card and have the error come across the TTY. Also, make sure your vendor has set the SEB up to look at the T-1's dropping. They may have the SEB setup so that if there is a T-1 error it will wait so long before they get paged. The thing is some T-1's may go down for less than a minute and then go back up. The SEB will look for that time interval before it sends a message to your vendor. Sort of like a threshold, If the T-1 goes down and comes back up before :60 seconds don't send a page.

**rixride** · 09-25-2006, 10:19 AM

Heck, I would demand a credit for the charges they were billing you to "Monitor" your pbx. That is crap if they didn't know or didn't check.

Also if your SEB is working right your vendor will get the codes but it would be a good way to see if they will do anything with them.

Typically your T1 will come back up if you unplug and plug it back in but if its your only one and you are not familiar with trouble shooting one if it doesn't I wouldn't play around with it.

Phoneguy77 · 09-25-2006, 10:20 AM

Call your vendor, they should be running reports on any SEB that hasn't reported in and find out why.

datadump · 09-25-2006, 11:32 AM

the trouble is that if you turn something off, then turn it back on...

your vendor dials in to check...sees everything is fine...they are not required to tell you that something broke they did nothing but now it's fixed... are they????
our vendor doesn't and is not required

Ancient1 · 09-25-2006, 12:27 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by datadump

the trouble is that if you turn something off, then turn it back on...

your vendor dials in to check...sees everything is fine...they are not required to tell you that something broke they did nothing but now it's fixed... are they????
our vendor doesn't and is not required

Well, see, that is part of the problem in itself. We know what they are supposed to do, but are they doing it? I know for a fact that they were NOT monitoring our PBX for a long period of time. They have not argued with this at all. They KNOW that when the T-1 went down they were supposed to be notified. They KNOW that when i started asking questions about something I had seen on the midnight routines that something was wrong and we found that the SEB had been dead longer than the T-1 had been down. If something WAS to happen... is the stuff they installed working ? I know if it goes down and all of a sudden folks can't dial out, the first a$$ to be found and chewed on / out will be mine! That is what this all about. I need verification that what they installed IS working. NOT that they SAY it is working, but, that it IS working.

I will go one step further, the T-1 that went down was the one configured for long distance. When it went down, all of our long distance calls rolled over and started going out the T-1 for local calls. That cost us a bit o cash. Especially when it went down 10 months ago. yes, I said TEN months ago! I guess I shouldn't worry about it though. Its just money we are giving them to do NOTHING. That is the american way, right?

datadump · 09-25-2006, 12:44 PM

ask for a weekly/monthly report....see what they say

I talked to our vendor(ronco) and they said they could..

Ancient1 · 09-25-2006, 12:53 PM

We are planning on a nice healthy meeting very soon with them. And since they were paid full price for services not rendered, I feel NO shame in setting off a few alarms to verify that they DO respond now.

THANKS!!!

Now, how do I set off an alarm that will not take the PBX down but make them at least let us know that they saw it? I don't want them on the line watching and waiting because I told them I was going to test something. I want to know IF they are really monitoring the PBX!! Did they set up the SEB correctly? I question this too since they could not set up the first one they brought out and the next one took them 2 days and several visits on-site to set up.

telecom116 · 09-25-2006, 01:40 PM

If you want to test something, I would disconnect the T1 circuit between the CSU and the PBX. I wouldn't pull the card; if it has a Clock Controller the switch will INI.

After you disconnect it, see if the LEDs on the SEB show any activity. The Teltronics SEBs that monitor my switches have LEDs that show when the dialup line is off-hook, connected to the other site by modem - DCD (data carrier detect), etc.

My provider forwards all alarms via e-mail to me. Every day I get a self-test alarm e-mail from each of my units.

Also, you could try unplugging the SEB from the power line. If set up to show power outages (and I know they do - I used to get alarms from someone elses SEB when the power went out).

Phoneguy77 · 09-25-2006, 02:57 PM

Iris prints a report listing every SEB in the databse that hasn't reported in in the last 24hrs. Whoever looks at these reports should be checking the SEB by dialing up to it and see why.

Ask your vendor for a weekly report of your alarms, they can be setup to print out automatically, I'm not sure but they may be abl to be faxed. it is a simple thing to setup.

Also you can have Iris page you when an alarm is generated for your site. have your vendor set this up.

If I was you I would make your vendor pay the difference in your long ditance bill as it was their fault. You paid them for services they didn't supply and cost you money.

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