RTMT Overview
The Cisco Unified RTMT or Real-Time Monitoring Tool allows an administrator to view a variety of counters, performance metrics about the Communications Manager server. For example, we might be able to see how many ports on a gateway are currently in use. We can see if we’ve ever run out of transcoding resources over a period of time. We could also use this RTMT tool to retrieve and view trace information, syslog information. We could even configure it to send us alarms if maybe various thresholds get exceeded. RTMT is going to run on an administrator’s PC and it’s going to communicate via secure HTTP typically with the Communications Manager publisher and that publisher can also send out e-mails to the administrator again if various alerts have been triggered.
Service Parameters
There are some service parameters that are associated with RTMT. If we want to manipulate these or view these, we can go under System > Service Parameters but normally when we select a service under Service Parameters we’re selecting the call manager service. Well not so here, after we select the Server, we’re going to select the service of Cisco AMC Service and we can check out parameters such as the Primary Collector. In other words that’s the server that’s going to collect the real-time information to be analyzed. We could specify the Failover Collector, in case the Primary Collector is not available. We could say that Data collection Enabled and it is by default but it may have been turned off, or you may want to turn it off. We could specify the Data Collection Polling Rate, it defaults to 30 seconds but as we’re looking at these real-time graphs within RTMT, 30 seconds to me seems like a long time sometimes. I’m waiting for something to show up and I have to wait nearly 30 seconds for that to happen. I can see an advantage possibly of having that reduced all the way down to a minimum of 15 seconds and the maximum is 300 seconds. We might also want to set the Server Synchronization Period. This is how long that the backup AMC is going to wait to start up, if it lost connectivity with the primary AMC and the default is 60 seconds.
Cisco Unified RTMT System Requirements
RTMT is an application that’s going to run on a PC like an administrator’s PC. There are a couple of different operating systems on which it could run. It could run on various Windows platforms or it could run on certain flavors of Linux. We need to have at least 128 MB of RAM that should not be a problem for us with modern day computers, and RTMT can be used to monitor a variety of Cisco Unified Communications appliances such as the Communications Manager, Unified Presence, Unity Connection and Unified Contact Center Express.
To get this application it’s not something we download from Cisco’s website, rather from the Communications Manager administration screen we can select Applications > Plugins and it’s going to be one of the listed plug-ins in fact there’ll be a downloadable file for Windows and there’ll be another one for Linux.
Enable a User for Cisco Unified RTMT Login
When you run RTMT you’re going to be prompted to login. You’ll specify the IP address of a server in the cluster and you’ll specify a User Name and a Password. The user could be either an Application User or an End User, and they would have to be assigned to be Standard CCM Admin Users and Standard Realtime And Trace Collection groups.
RTMT Menu
Under the File menu, we can do things such as saving and restoring and deleting various RTMT profiles. And we won’t take the time to go through all the different menu options, we’ll take a look at some of these coming up. But one or two more what about the Window menu.
The Window menu is going to allow a user to close one of the windows that we might have opened. We might have one window open that’s monitoring the number of calls that are currently active, we might have another window open that’s showing alarms. We might have another window open that’s allowing us to view a trace file. We might want to clean things up and close some of those windows.
The Application menu might allow user to browse certain administrative web pages like the Communications Manager Administration web page or the Unified Serviceability webpage, it might let us browse those web pages.
In the left-hand pane of RTMT we have three different categories of things that could be monitored. There’s the System category, the CallManager category and the AnalysisManager.
The System category contains things such as information about the health of the underlying platform, like memory utilization or CPU utilization or disk storage.
The CallManager section gives us statistics and summary information about Cisco Unified Communications Manager. Things dealing with call processing for example. We could also search the Communications Manager database for specific devices.
The AnalysisManager area is going to give us information about licenses and includes tools such as the Call Path Analysis. And if RTMT is pointing to a Presence server or a Unity Connection server we might also have different menu sections for monitoring those specific servers.
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