Troubleshooting Conference Bridges: RTMT and Tracing

Here are a collection of tips to help monitor and troubleshoot Conference Bridge usage.  This is meant to be supporting documentation to the other blog entries posted here about Meet-Me Conferencing and Conference Bridges.

I particularly like the option to monitor conference bridge counters via RTMT.  This has been known to expose a potential problem before it impacts users.  It's MUCH better to know that resources are growing thin in a growing enterprise BEFORE it affects the CIO.

Dependency Records

So, imagine you are troubleshooting an issue related to a conference bridge, but you're unsure which media resource groups could potentially use it.  Instead of searching through each media resource group and seeing which CFBs are associated, simply use the CUCM feature, "Dependency Records".   The link for Dependency Records will be available on the conference bridges configuration page.  This will tell you exactly which media resource groups are using a specific conference bridge. 

Monitoring Conference Bridge Usage in RTMT

The Real Time Monitoring Tool perfmon counters for conference bridges (IP Voice Media Streaming Application) allow you to monitor:

• CFBConferencesActive  :  This counter represents the number of active (currently in use) conferences.
• CFBConferencesTotal  :  This counter represents the total number of conferences that started since the Cisco IP Voice Media Streaming Application service started.
• CFBConnectionsLost  :  This counter represents the total number of times since the last restart of the Cisco IP Voice Media Streaming Application that a Cisco Unified CallManager connection was lost.
• CFBConnectionState  :  For each Cisco Unified CallManager that is associated with a SW Conference Bridge, this counter represents the current registration state to Cisco Unified CallManager; 0 indicates no registration to Cisco Unified CallManager; 1 indicates registration to the primary Cisco Unified CallManager; 2 indicates connection to the secondary Cisco Unified CallManager (connected to Cisco Unified CallManager but not registered until the primary Cisco Unified CallManager connection fails).
• CFBStreamsActive  :  This counter represents the total number of currently active simplex (one direction) streams for all conferences. Each stream direction counts as one stream. In a three-party conference, the number of active streams equals 6.
• CFBStreamsAvailable  :  This counter represents the remaining number of streams that are allocated for the conference bridge that are available for use. This counter starts as 2 multiplied by the number of configured connections (defined in the Cisco IP Voice Media Streaming App service parameter for Conference Bridge, Call Count) and is reduced by one for each active stream started.
• CFBStreamsTotal  :  This counter represents the total number of simplex (one direction) streams that connected to the conference bridge since the Cisco IP Voice Media Streaming Application service started.

Conference Bridge Traces in CUCM

Cisco Unified Communications Manager writes all errors for conference bridges to the Local SysLog Viewer in the Real Time Monitoring Tool.

In Cisco Unified Serviceability, you can set traces for the Cisco IP Voice Media Streaming Application service (using Trace Configuration); to troubleshoot most issues, you must choose the Significant or Detailed option for the service, not the Error option. After you troubleshoot the issue, change the Debug Trace Level back to the Error option.

How to See Conference Bridge Logs

To quickly see the trace and debug information being generated in the previous section, connect to the CUCM's CLI and issue the following commands:

file list activelog cm/trace/cms/sdi/*.txt

file get activelog cm/trace/cms/sdi/*.txt

file view activelog cm/trace/cms/sdi/cms00000000.txt

file tail activelog cm/trace/cms/sdi/cms00000000.txt

More Information

Cisco CUCM System Guide, Release 7.x