Administrator Guide: BMS 2.0

Introduction

The Backup & Monitoring Solution (BMS) is a key part in the services offering of the Escaux SMP. It offers enhanced reliability through backup and monitoring of the SOP appliances that are installed at the customer site. Both components are based on industry standard open source solutions that are integrated into the SMP. This provides a best-of-both-worlds approach:

• The use of an established open source component guarantees quality, continued support by a community and the possibility to study and, if necessary, modify the source code.
• The SMP databases contain the complete configuration of the SOPs, modules and all other configuration. Integration with the SMP therefore means that the backup and monitoring subsystems can be automatically configured based on this information.

The BMS thus gives you an automatic solution for enhanced reliability of the SOPs. It helps you implement an automated reliability policy without the hard configuration work that would be necessary every time you change your configuration.

This document offers an overview of the two key components of the BMS: the backup subsystem and the monitoring subsystem. It provides a quick overview of how these are integrated into the SMP and links to the official documentation of the components used for the implementation.

Backup solution: BackupPC

BackupPC is a high-performance, enterprise-grade system for backing up systems running various operating systems. It is fully automated, highly flexible and configurable. Installation and configuration can be quite complex.

Integration into the Escaux environment

Escaux provides a prepacked, preconfigured version of BackupPC as part of the BMS system. Once installed, this component will automatically back up all important user data from the list of SOPs on the SMP. The BMS is responsible for generating and maintaining the configuration of what to back up automatically for every SOP. If additional modules that require data backup are installed on a SOP, they will automatically register the paths to included in every backup to the BMS system.

By default, the backup consists of

• The content of the SOP databases, i.e. call data record archives, attributes, dynamic profile parameters, ...
• Voicemail messages
• Call recordings through net.Desktop
• Fax messages
• Audio prompts
• Music-on-hold

Configuration

There is currently no configuration for BackupPC. Configuration is automatic: when you define a new SOP on the SMP, all the data relevant for the installed modules will be backed up.

A full backup is performed every 7 days, and an incremental backup is performed on a daily basis.

Usage

To view the status of BackupPC, its logs and advanced configuration, you can browse to http://(smphostname)/backuppc/. Here you get the BackupPC dashboard from where you can inspect, make and restore backups and check the logfiles.

Offsite backups

More information about offsite backups can be found in the Offsite Backup task

Additional documentation

The BackupPC documentation is available at http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/faq/BackupPC.html

Monitoring solution: Nagios

Nagios is a powerful monitoring system that enables organizations to identify and resolve IT infrastructure problems before they affect critical business processes. Nagios is designed with scalability and flexibility in mind, which makes it a perfect fit for the Escaux solution.

Integration into the Escaux environment

Nagios is automatically configured for all your SOPs. It performs two types of checks:

• Host checks:
  • simply checks that the SOP is reachable from the SMP.
  • a host check is configured automatically for every SOP that is managed by the SMP.
• Service checks:
  • checks various functions of the SOP on the application level as well as the system level.
  • service checks are configured by means of probe resources in the SMP (see the following section).
  • service checks report one of these states:
    • OK: normal condition.
    • WARNING: there is a problem that requires attention but it is currently not (yet) service affecting.
    • CRITICAL: there is a problem that is service affecting.
    • UNKNOWN: the check could not be performed.
    • PENDING: the check has not yet been performed.
  • in addition to the state, there is a line of text that gives some more detailed info.
  • some checks also have performance data which is used to produce graphs.
    • to see the graph, hover or click the "wheel" icon next to the check name.

Configuration

Configuring probes

In the SMP, select a SOP and navigate to:

Click "Add" to add a new probe, or edit a probe to set its parameters.

Detailed information on each individual type of probe is available at the probes reference guide.

After modifying the probe configuration, you need to run apply changes, reinstall the SNMP Agent module and then restart Nagios to apply the changes. You can do this in the SOP shell of the BMS server, which works just like the SOP shell on a SOP. After logging in and starting the shell, select

Configuring hostgroups

Please refer to the vSOP Admin guide

Usage

To view the Nagios dashboard, the status of your SOPs and the alarms, you can browse to http://(smphostname)/nagios/.

Additional documentation

The Nagios documentation is available at http://www.nagios.org/