State
Skyetel sends OPTIONS Pings to your IP every 30 seconds. We use your reply to set the state. An IP can have three states.
- Unknown - No data has been received from a region or your account balance is depleted. (this should be expected when a region is undergoing routine maintenance or if the IP is new)
- UP - Your IP is responding to Skyetel (It will be green)
- DOWN - Your IP is either not responding or it is responding with a 503 error (It will be Red)
The state of an IP is determined when at least 2 regions receive the same response twice. For example - if your IP responds with a 503 two times to at least two of our regions, our systems will indicate that it is DOWN.
At any time you can see the State of your IP from IP Authentication → IP Health. This is what it will look like:
A healthy IP will report with 8 green dots to indicate all four of our testing regions show the IP as online. If an IP is not responding to a monitoring region, that region will report it as down and turn one of the fields red. If you want to receive alerting notifications, please click "Off/On" toggle in the "Uptime Alerts" column. You can disable the alerts by clicking the toggle again.
If the state of an IP is down, our network will no longer attempt to send calls to it and will begin failing over to secondary IPs based upon the priority specified in the IP group (more on that here: IP Groups). We always recommend having a secondary IP in every IP Group to avoid downtime.
IP Health and Your Account Balance
When your account balance is depleted your IPs will no longer be monitored by Skyetel and traffic will not be directed to your IPs. During this time they will be marked in an Unknown state until your account balance has returned to a positive balance.
What the colors mean
The IP can have three states:
- Green - Your IP is responding to our network, and should be able to receive calls
- Red - Your IP is not responding to our network, and cannot receive calls
- Orange - We don't have enough information to determine your IP's state yet or the Skyetel region is undergoing maintenance
Fraud Thresholds
In order to help you combat fraud, our network can be configured to warn you when the numbers of outbound channels exceed a specified threshold.
When an IP's outbound channels exceed the threshold you specify, we will send you an alert and an optional SMS. (We use the "Technical Alerts" contact list in the settings)
How We Calculate Channels
In order to minimize false alarms, our network does not send fraud alerts the moment the IP exceeds the Channel Threshold. Instead, alerts are triggered once an IP sustains a channel count above its threshold for more than 5 minutes within a 10 minute period.
Health
To enable Health, please make sure you have a check mark enabled by the title of each section and you have allowed the Endpoint Monitoring IP Addresses available here.
= Enabled
= Disabled
QOS
When QOS is enabled, Skyetel will send an IP 5 pings every 60 seconds. We use the IP's responses to provide the following metrics:
- Latency (shown in milliseconds)
- This measures how long it takes for your IP to reply to our PING. We recommend this stay below 100ms.
- Packet Loss (shown in %)
- This measures how many packets are being lost between our regions and the IP. We recommend this stay below 1%.
- Jitter (shown in milliseconds)
- This measures the differences in response times between the individual ping packets we send. We recommend this stay below 20ms.
On our graphs, each of our regions will show as a separate color to indicate the regions:
If your graphs go above the thin red line, that is a good indication that that IP is experiencing call quality problems.
SNMP
When SNMP is enabled, Skyetel will query your server's SNMP service every 5 minutes to update its core system metrics
- CPU Usage
- Memory Usage
- Disk Usage
You are able to view the last 6 hours of data from our network using the time period selector at the top of the Health window. We do not retain historical statistics beyond 6 hours.
Enabling SNMP
To make the IP SNMP Health work, your PBX must have SNMP installed and available.
These instructions are for users who are new to SNMP or IPTables. They are safe, but if you have an advanced configuration or already use SNMP, these steps may not work for you.
Centos
Run these commands as Root or Sudo
yum install net-snmp net-snmp-utils -y
echo "rocommunity public" > /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf
#CentOS 6
chkconfig snmpd on
service snmpd restart
#CentOS 7
systemctl enable snmpd
service snmpd restart
Debian
Run these commands as Root or Sudo
apt-get install snmpd
echo "rocommunity public" > /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf
systemctl enable snmpd
service snmpd restart
IPTables
Now that SNMP is installed, you need to allow our SNMP monitoring to access your server
iptables -I INPUT -p udp --dport 161 -s 52.14.37.123 -j ACCEPT
iptables-save
Please allow UDP 161 from 52.14.37.123 to your PBX.
Alerting
The Skyetel network can alert specified administrators when it detects an IP has gone offline or begins sending a 503 error. In those cases, you will receive an e-mail that reads like this:
Hello,
At least two Skyetel regions have reported that your monitored IP (8.8.8.8) is not responding and cannot receive phone traffic. Please make sure your IP is running properly and has been configured to accept traffic from Skyetel IPs.
To retrieve a list of our current IP Addresses, please go here.
If you have failover configured, we will automatically redirect your phone traffic to your backup IP..
Thank you for being an awesome customer 😊
Love,
Your friendly Skyetel Robot
To enable Uptime Alerts, simply click on "Off/On" toggle in the IP Health menu.
Skyetel will notify of a down state to the e-mail address specified in your settings, and will continue to alert you of the downed state every 3 hours or until the IP comes back online or you disable the alerting for the impacted IP.