This covers a few options you can use for trouble shooting. Covers Masquerading, MOS Scores, Call Flows, and SIP Traces.
There are numerous tools available to the reseller and office manager that can help them diagnose and fix issues. Most of these tools are accessible via the call history so we recommend you get yourself familiar with how the call history works first: What can I see in the call history?
Masquerade
Masquerading lets a user "login" as another user to see what they can see on the portal. It also lets them call from the web app as if they were that user. This is useful for testing portal configuration setups, as well as quickly testing calls to and from a user using the web app.
To begin a Masquerade, you must first be in the domain view and on the "Users" Tab, from here click the "Masquerade" button next to the user you want to masquerade as.
Note that some users don't have a masquerade button, this is because these users have the scope "No Portal" and have no portal access for us to login to via the masquerade.
As you can see, I am now logged in as a different user, I can see a different name in the top left, and as the user is a site manager I can only see the users belonging to the same user I just logged in to.
You can easily tell when you are masquerading because of the yellow banner that appears at the top of the portal letting you know who you are masquerading as, as well as what domain they belong to.
Click the "End Masquerade" button on the yellow banner to return to your own user.
IMPORTANT: By default only resellers can masquerade, however you can give access to the masquerade feature to any scope that has access to the domain view. One point to make here though is that users cannot ever masquerade as a user with a scope of same or higher access than themselves, so Resellers cannot masquerade as resellers, office managers cannot masquerade as office managers or resellers, and so on.
QOS Module
The Netsapiens platform is integrated with VoIPMonitor which is a third party packet sniffing tool designed for usage with SIP platforms, this setup is referred to as the QOS Module. QOS is setup to monitor every single call on the platform and create a report for each call so the end user can easily see call quality.
On every call in the call history (as long as it lasted long enough for QOS to record it) there is a score from 0-4.5 called the MOS score. This score is a grading of how good the call quality on the call was (0 being worst, 4.5 being the best).
As you can see each call has 2 scores, this is because QOS creates a score for both the caller and the receiver, this way its very easy to see where issues are coming from at a glance. The score on the left is the score for the caller, and the score on the right is the score for the receiver.
You will notice one of the sides has a low score indicating poor quality on the call. In this scenario it's an outbound call from a phone registered to our servers which has a good score, and the score on the receivers end is poor.
If you had a similar issue and had a end user raise an issue with call quality, you could easily see that the issue is on the other end and not with your server or equipment.
On top of being able to see the MOS score, you can hover over the score for a call to break it down further.
Here you can very quickly see the device making the call, the codec being used, the MOS score, as well as any jitter or packet loss on the call.
Call Flow
The call flow is a tool that lets you see all the routing and events that happened on a call in a clear and concise diagram. The call flow can be accessed by clicking the call flow button next to a call in the call.
After you click the call flow button, the Call Flow diagram will show up in it's own panel.
Here you can see step by step each event on the call, the exact time of each event, and how much time passed between each event.
See below for another, more complex call flow.
You can see here the kind of information that is shown, you can see who called who, where they went through the platform, what options they selected on auto attendants, how long they were placed on hold, etc...
You can use call flows to easily see how and where calls are routing through the platform.
SIP Flow
A SIP flow shows a very complex and detailed diagram of the exact SIP responses and switch logic that happens on a call. Whilst this is not as easy to understand as the Call Flow and QOS Module, it does provide all you could possibly need to diagnose issues with the platform.
To access the SIP Flow of a call you need to find it in the call history then click the SIP Flow button.
When you have selected this, the SIP flow will show up.
1 - SIP Flow Tree: On the left hand side is a tree of all interactions between devices/servers/trunks.
2 - Information Window: On the right hand side is a window containing information about the current request/response/switch logic that's selected.
3 - SIP Request: This represents a SIP request being sent from one location to the other, SIP Requests are always written as single words in full capital letters (INVITE, ACK, BYE, NOTIFY, etc...). The word in white represents the type of SIP Request, and the arrow shows where the request is going to and where it came from. Click the SIP Request type to bring up further information about it in the information window on the right.
4 - SIP Response: This represents a SIP response being sent from one location to another, SIP Responses are always written as 3 digit numbers (100, 183, 200, etc), similar to SIP Requests, the number represents the type of response and the arrow represents where the response is going and where it came from. Click on the number to see further information about the response in the information window.
5 - Switch Logic: The small white gears in a black circle represent the switch logic that's occurring on the core server. When the core server receives a SIP response/request it will process this and then send a response/request to another location. The processing that determines what happens is called switch logic. To view exactly what switch logic is happening, click the black circle and it will appear in the information window.
6 - Locations: These are the locations where SIP Responses/Requests have been coming from on this particular call, locations can be either a SIP Device, a SIP Trunk, or the Core server (the core server is always in Green and contains all the switch logic).