Required Subscription: Mitel MiVC, ShoreTel ECC
Required Permission Level: Administrator
While time synchronization issues do not happen often, when they do they can cause serious problems in reporting and dashboard perspectives. Making sure your switches and servers are in sync will prevent this and ensure your Brightmetrics reports are accurate. This article covers the importance of time synchronization, the types of issues that arise from out-of-sync systems, typical causes, and known good configurations.
The importance of time synchronization
In the Mitel (ShoreTel) CDR database, calls are broken out into "connect" records for each party, workgroup, and system involved in any specific call. Because these records appear as independent records, they do not appear to be a direct result of one another. To accurately determine the goings and comings of these connect records, Brightmetrics cross-references time-related data across all systems involved — servers, switches, IP phones, and other network equipment. When these systems are out of sync, the times, stages, and durations in the lifetime of calls become obscured and even indeterminable.
Example: Cradle to Grave (C2G) data — in sync
There are no gaps in the legs — one picks up when the previous ends, and the caller (top line) and the agent (bottom line) both end at the right of the screen.
Example: Cradle to Grave (C2G) data — with time synchronization issues
Two gaps are visible. The first shows the caller (top line) not reaching the end of the call, and the second shows the legs of the call not connecting together.
How time gets out of sync
Typical causes include but are not limited to:
Management connectivity problems: Communication between the server and the switches is experiencing disruption. This would be indicated by large red or yellow blocks on Director's switch connectivity status page.
Equipment configuration issues:
- If a switch is managed by a DVS (Distributed Voice Server), it will get its time from that server rather than the HQ server.
- Voice-model switches use an SNTP (Network Time Protocol) server directly to synchronize their time, and so must also use a common time source.
Configurations and how to resolve
Each network configuration has its own set of steps and implications. The following configurations have been known to function with few complications:
- If all devices are part of the same domain forest, pointing all of them to a single domain controller will synchronize time across all devices using Active Directory Time Services.
- If the devices are not part of a domain, the Mitel (ShoreTel) HQ Server can act as the authoritative time source — all other devices can then be pointed to it for time synchronization.
Since Brightmetrics does not maintain your physical phone system, you will need to reach out to your system admin or Mitel resource to resolve time sync issues, using the suggested configurations above as a guide. Even a time sync offset of 10 seconds or so will create reporting issues when tracing call activity.
Brightmetrics does not pre-emptively adjust reported times based on those offsets and is not able to do so.
Resolving time synchronization issues does not rewrite the timestamps on historical data records.
Questions or feedback? Please email us at support@brightmetrics.com.