Why should you deploy Monitoring server at all?

If you have installed Lync Server 2010 Monitoring Server, your system will automatically collect a wealth of information about all the communication take place in your organization. The data collected by Monitoring Server falls into one of two categories:

• Call detail records (CDR), which includes information such as who made a call (or initiated a conference), who that person called, and the duration of the call
• Quality of Experience (QoE), which reports standard telecommunications metrics (such as jitter, packet loss, and round-trip times) that can be used to help administrators assess the quality of a call and to troubleshoot any problems that might have lessened the quality of a call

How to deploy Monitor Server and Reports

• See this article on how to deploy the monitoring server and reports: http://blogs.technet.com/b/nexthop/archive/2011/06/27/deployment-details-for-lync-monitoring-reports.aspx
• One Monitoring server can be associated with multiple pools
• A single Monitoring server can capture data for 250,000 users
• Based on the Lync Server user model
  • the CDR database grows 31.5 KB per user per day
  • the QoE database grows 28 KB per user per day
• Calculate the monitoring database size using the following formula: DB size = (DB growth per user per day) * (Number of users) * (Number of days)

When to use the Monitoring Reports?

If you are serious about succeeding with a Lync Server deployment and want to maintain and at the same time document overall usage and acceptance within the organization you should deploy a Lync monitoring server. The reports are best used when you want information about

• Usage trends – see how the deployment is used by the users and is the key reporting tool to measure success of adoption in the organization
• Conversation quality – see trends on how the network is scaled in terms meeting expected voice quality
• Reliability – Is the solution reliable? Look for unexpected call failures and see if you can find a weak link in you deployment

You can find the link to your monitoring reports from the Lync Control Panel, Home tab->Top Actions

What to look for?

Now this I think is the key part of the monitoring reports. Lync Server 2010 monitoring reports introduced color coding of bad values directly in to the reports. Yellow meaning it was not that good and red meaning bad or epic failure. You will see different terms when going through the reports, and these are fairly typical when looking at a VoIP system. Lync Server 2010 is a network based VOIP solution that depends heavily on network quality and scalability. Overall usage is therefore also of interest in terms of knowing if a certain wan link is overloaded.

Mean Opinion Score and Metrics

Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) are algorithm to determine the perceived quality of a call that was complete. The call is rated from 1 to 5 where 5 is the best quality. That being said you can not compare scores across different codecs because they have different max values. See below table:

* The codec used in PC-PSTN can either be Siren or RTAudio NB depending on the configuration of the Mediation Server

Now here is the important part: Because the maximum Network MOS varies depending on the scenario (because different codecs are used), it is usually more interesting to look at the average degradation of the Network MOS during the call. The average degradation can be broken down into how much is due to network jitter and how much is due to packet loss. For very small degradations, the cause of the degradation may not be available.

Degradation in Network MOS is the Average amount MOS degradation experienced during a call. A degradation over 0.5 may indicate a poor call.

What may cause a degrading network MOS?

• Congestion
  • High Jitter, must not exceed 30ms
• Lack of bandwidth
  • High packet loss, must not exceed 10%
  • Resulting in high concealed audio sample that is a technique used to smooth out the abrupt transition that would usually be caused by dropped network packets
    • Must not exceed 7%
• Wireless congestion
  • High Jitter, must not exceed 30ms
• Interference
  • High round trip time, must not exceed 150ms
• Overloaded media server
  • Make sure the server has the resources it needs

High degradation results in distorted or lost audio

Read more about MOS values here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb894481(v=office.12).aspx

Monitoring reports of interest

The cool thing about the monitoring reports is that they are intertwined with each other. You may start out looking at trends seeing how the system is utilized and end up looking at diagnostics reports of failed calls. A lot of the fields are clickable and will lead you to other reports and help you dig down to the report you are interested in.

Usage Reports

There is a lot of reports on Overall Usage and Trends. You must find the report for the modality you are interested in to see if you users are Lyncing the right way. Some examples are Conference Summary Report, Peer-to-Peer Activity Summary Report and User Registration Report. They all give some nice data views of the adoption in the organization.

Conversation Quality

The main reports that I recommend looking into is

• Media Quality Summary Report
  • Show all users related activity relating to audio and video
• Server Performance Report
  • Show all audio and video activity involving servers like conferencing and PSTN

These are quite similar reports and I look for poor call percentage in conferences over a period in time giving you a trending overview. I single out conferences because this is what have biggest impact on Quality of Experience by the users just because there usually are more than two users in a conference.

Poor call percentage is the percentage of calls being made that classifies as poor calls. What defines a poor call? A majority of these calls have a Degradation in MOS value higher than 0,5.

Reliability

There is a really great video showing you how you can use the Monitoring Server Reports for looking for unexpected failures of audio calls created by the Lync team. I recommend watching it.

System-wide Troubleshooting: Lync Call Connectivity - This video shows how to use the Call Diagnostic Summary Report of Monitoring Server Reports to analyze system-wide call activity in order to identify and resolve potential Lync call connectivity problems.

Closing notes

It is possible to spend a lot of time with the monitoring reports. They could be used for adoption analysis of the deployment or for seeing trends in quality as well as troubleshoot unexpected failures. Most of the reports are self-explanatory but an overall understanding is important. Hope this article may help you get started with using the Lync Server 2010 Monitoring Reports and if you have not implemented them, now is a good time.

References

Using Monitoring Server Reports: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg558662.aspx
Work Smart Guide for Monitoring Server Reports: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=213232
Getting Started with Monitoring in Lync Server 2010: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=219000
Understanding the Monitoring Server Reports: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=219001
Using Monitoring Server Reports: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=219003
Monitoring and Troubleshooting Lync Calls: http://blogs.technet.com/b/nexthop/archive/2011/10/10/monitoring-and-troubleshooting-lync-call-videos.aspx
Custom Reports: Call Detail Recording (CDR) Database Schema: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=205479
Custom Reports: Quality of Experience (QoE) Database Schema: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=209915
Mean Opinion Score and Metrics: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb894481(v=office.12).aspx

It has been one the most popular posts on msunified.net. I now feel it is more suited that it is moved to the Lync TechNet Wiki so that everyone can add their blog posts to this list. I am hoping everyone will use it actively so that when you write a blog post or see a great article that should be there that you will add it there yourself. I will monitor the wiki to ensure the quality of the content posted so we don’t get spammers and such adding articles that should not be there.

How to add a post

• Start with navigating to the article
  • Found at http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/10119.wiki-lync-server-2010-features-and-how-to-configure-them.aspx
• Hit sign-in at the top right corner
• After you have signed in with your live ID you are able to edit the article
• Click the edit tab, and you will get a word editor
• Add the post you want to add
• Add the post with title and full link
  • Use the full link because it will give the best search rating for the blog post on search engines
• If you can add a comment on what you edited it would be appreciated
• Click save at the bottom of the page and you have contributed to the community

It will be fun to see how the community will respond to this kind of wiki and how the site will evolve in time.

At first i thought it was a PowerShell script to add contacts to a users contact list since the name starts with CS. After downloading and installing it I found out it was a program that enables you to do this from a GUI.

What does it do?

• It lets you import contacts into Lync\OCS from
  • AOL Instant Messenger (blt export, version 2)
  • Windows Live (csv export)
    • Cannot import groups
    • Because some WLM contacts may not have msn domain the contacts may be imported wrong and not working
    • Example: sh@msunified.net needs to be in the format sh(msunified.net)@msn.com in Lync, when its not imported like this it will fail so beware
  • YAHOO Messenger (Yahoo csv export)
    • Cannot import groups
  • Plain Text
    • One line per contact, optionally add comma and group name
    • Example: sh@msunified.net,Sales
    • For distribution groups, enter the group email and then _dg_ as the group name
    • Example: accounting@contoso.com,_dg_
• The contacts can be imported to a single user or a group of users using the batch option
• You need to use dbimpexp.exe to export all contacts or indivdual contacts from the Lync SQL contact store
  • The tool is a Lync native tool found under C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Lync Server 2010\Support
• After you have exported your users you can use the CSContactImporter to append the contacts to the users list
• Then you need to use dbimpexp.exe to import the users contacts to the Lync SQL contact store again

What does it look like?

Using it in a scenario

To me the batch import is the most interesting scenario. Being able to prepopulate a Lync users contact list with its closest peers in the office or his og her virtual coworkers. The ability to add a default group to all contact lists with telepresence rooms or IT support seems like a usable scenario. Espcially when its the first time users start using Lync, I bet the new users spends their first time in Lync trying to find their coworkers.

To populate a few users with their closest coworkers in a group

• You need to export all users contact list from the Lync contact database, even though the contact lists is empty
  • For Standard Edition run the command: dbimpexp.exe /hrxmlfile:”c:\TempCSCI\users.xml”
  • For Enterprise Edition run the command: dbimpexp.exe /hrxmlfile:”c:\TempCSCI\users.xml” /sqldatabase:”sql server hostname”\”instance name”
  • It is not possbile to export groups of users using this tool, only one or all
• Create the contacts you want imported into the users contact lists in a txt
  • sh@msunified.net,Sales
  • vf@msunified.net,Sales
  • me@msunified.net,Sales
  • Where sales is the group name, if a group exists from before it will update this group if you check ”Carry over groups”
• If you just want to add a distribution group instead use the following syntax
  • sales@msunified.net,_dg_
  • Personally I don’t like using distribution groups because sometimes the group expansion is not always that snappy and not all clients support them
• You need to create one file per user with the content above and the filename must match the SIP address of the user they will be imported into
  • sh@msunified.net.txt
• Make sure all the files are stored in the same folder
• Populate CSContactImporter as shown below and hit Generate
  • The importer will only alter the users specified in the txt files and no other users

• A log file will be written to the same folder and you can open it to see if any users failed to import
• Now you need to use dbimpexp.exe to import the new contact lists
  • For Standard Edition run the command: dbimpexp.exe /import /hrxmlfile:”c:\TempCSCI\users_merged.xml” /restype:all
  • For Enterprise Edition run the command: dbimpexp.exe /import /hrxmlfile:”c:\TempCSCI\users_merged.xml” /sqldatabase:”sql server hostname”\”instance name” /restype:all
• After the import is finished, the users need to log out of Lync and then in again to see the new groups and contacts
  • Remember that all changes users have done to their contact lists between you export and import will be lost, make sure to do this in low traffic periods

Conclusion

The tool works and it is now possible to import contacts form other IM solutions or predefening contacts based on AD groups or office location before users log on using this tool. If you have lots of users a lot of these steps may be automated using PowerShell, like finding the users you want to have in your group, creating the txt files and dbimpexp export\import. The only manual thing here is the tool itself. I am sure a cool script to handle this will be written as the community will get more hands-on.

You may also want to try out LyncAddContacts.vbs – VBS Script to add Groups to multiple contacts created by MVP Jeff Guillet. The main difference between CSImportContact and LyncAddContacts:

• CSImportContacts can new users and groups based on text files or import from another IM program and is a GUI
• LyncAddContacts needs to have a defined dummy user with only the groups or users you want to import and is a VBS script

I was doing an Exchange UM integration with Lync. Everything worked fine and I was following fellow MVP blog article by Jeff Schertz: http://blog.schertz.name/2010/11/lync-and-exchange-um-integration/

The Problem

• When I got to the point where I was going to run the Exchange script exchucutil.ps1 on the Exchange UM server I got the following error

Using Global Catalog: GC://”Different subdomain”

The UM server wasn’t able to read the Communications Server pool objects. Verify that Communications Server is deployed in this Active Directory forest and you’re a member of the RTCUniversalServerReadOnlyGroup group or have sufficient rights to read this Active Directory container object.Additional information:Group RTCUniversalServerAdmins couldn’t be found.

• Checking the web for possible solutions I came over this blog post for UM integration with OCS back in the days: http://etcuc.blogspot.com/2009/02/exchucutil.html

Probable Cause

• The cause of this was that Exchange Schema extension was done in another subdomain.
• When the Get-Ucpools.ps1 script triggered it could not find the Lync security groups to access the Lync pool configuration.

The Solution

• As the blog depicts the solution was to edit the Get-Ucpools.ps1 script that is used by the ExchUcUtil.ps1 script
  • Make a copy of the original script before editing
  • Remember to open NotePad “as administrator”, else you can not save the script
• Comment out the original global catalog discovery line
  • #$entry.psbase.Path = “GC://” + $globalCatalog
  • $entry.psbase.Path = “GC://MYGCin.Domain.com”
• Add a local domain controller that is also a global catalog
  • To determine what domain controller is global catalog check this TechNet article: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc786686(v=ws.10).aspx
• Save the script
• Rerun ExchUcUtil.ps1

Dear Ståle Hansen, Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2012 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Lync technical communities during the past year.

I feel very honored to be part of this outstanding community and I want to mention the MVP Summit as a highlight of the experience. With all the cool things happening around Lync, Office and Windows 8 I look forward to contribute to the community the coming year as well.

Resources

About the MVP Award Program
Lync MVP Awardees
MVPs.org community site
Microsoft MVP FAQ

Lately I have been working with Lync Server 2010 and using System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 (OpsMgr) for the best possible monitoring and troubleshooting environment for a customer. Everything got set up correct and the integration seemed to look ok. Except that Synthetic Transactions did not work.

Background

Synthetic Transactions can be run from PowerShell in any Lync deployment. They are “test-cs” cmdlets and enables you to test features serverside with actual users. If you run (get-command “test-cs*”).count from Lync Server Management Shell you will see that there are 36 test cmdlets ranging from testing the ability to log on (Test-CsRegistration) to testing Audio Video conferencing (Test-CsAvConference).

OpsMgr continuously run Synthetic Transactions (ST) against the Lync environment to make sure everything is working. In a best practice environment you should deploy a dedicated server to run the ST’s from. This is because they may generate heavy load on you production servers. OpsMgr runs a PowerShell script that access the node remotely and runs the test cmdlets

For more information on how to deploy Lync Server 2010 Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2, download and read the documentation here: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=12375

Symptoms

After OpsMgr was deployed we noticed the following symptoms

• Some of the ST’s did not work failing with a “This operation has timed out” message
• The ones that did not work was
  • AV conferencing
  • Instant Messaging Conferencing
  • Instant Messaging P2P
  • Presence
  • P2P AV
• The rest of them seemed to work
• Logging on the ST Node we ran the test cmdlets manually and all of them worked
  • Telling us that the users configured to run the cmdlets worked with the CsHealthMonitoringConfiguration
  • We did not have the problem depicted in this forum post: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/ocsmonitoring/thread/81d1b976-ca07-41e8-9ede-6c600f5c2e33/
• So the problem was that it worked locally, but not remotely from OpsMgr and no other indications or errors where thrown

Resolution

I figured it had to be a configuration problem somewhere and went through all of the configuration on the Node from start to end using this blog post: http://www.vnext.be/2011/03/06/scom-opsmgr-lync-2010-management-pack-deploying-synthetic-transactions-sts/ It hit me when I saw the cmdlet for configuring CsTrustedApplication that we defined a port this application would access.

New-CsTrustedApplication -ApplicationId -TrustedApplicationPoolFqdn -Port <PortNumber> -Verbose

Checking the local Windows Firewall on the server I found that an exception for that port had not been created, and it dawned on me that they need to be created manually. Adding the exception for the port on the server and recalculating the ST health on OpsMgr solved to problem this time, saving the day and made me able to roll out Lync to that customer.

Conclusion

Always remember when creating Trusted Applications you need to manually create a firewall rule allowing inbound traffic to that specific port.

Last updated 17.01.2012

Connecting

In addition to log on the Lync Server and open Lync Server Management Shell you can also access and work with Lync through remote PowerShell which came available in V2. Here is what you need to connect. The url could be your external webservices url as well

$session = New-PSSession -ConnectionUri https://lync-admin.contoso.local/OcsPowershell -Credential (Get-Credential)
Import-PSSession -Session $session

Finding cmdlets

There are several ways to find cmdlets in Lync. If you like the graphical representation like a mind map there is some good ones created by MVP Tom Arbuthnot

• Lync 2010 PowerShell Commandlets by Verb
• Lync 2010 PowerShell Commandlets by Category

In PowerShell there is some cmdlets available as well when finding what is available

#Get all cmdlets for Lync that contains -Cs
Get-Command *-Cs* -CommandType cmdlet -Module Lync
#Get all cmdlets that contains user
Get-Command *user* -CommandType cmdlet -Module Lync

#When you find the cmdlet you want to use find the syntax on how to use it
Get-Help Get-CsUser -Examples
#Use -Online to open the TechNet website for that cmdlet
Get-Help Get-CsUser -Online

#Looking for a specific setting to set and don't know which cmdlet that can modify it use the below code
$params = Get-Command -CommandType Cmdlet *-Cs* | % { $n = $_.Name ; $_.Parameters.Values | % { Add-Member -in $_ noteproperty CmdletName $n; $_ } }
$params | where { $_.Name -like "*meeting*" } | select Name,CmdletName
#This is cool, found the trick over at http://blogs.technet.com/b/csps/archive/2010/06/14/howtofindsetting.aspx

Cmdlets

There are some cmdlets I use more than others and find useful. Let me know what is your most used cmdlets.

#List a lot of the topology information, here you can sort to find URLs, ports and servernames configured
Get-CsService

#List all pools in your topology, useful for finding Front End pool name, when you forget it
Get-CsPool

#The only policy that is not available in Lync Control Panel, lot of nice features can be configured here
Get-CsClientPolicy

#Update the AddressBook files
Update-CsAddressBook

#List the CMS replication status for each Lync Server
Get-CsManagementStoreReplicationStatus

Oneliners

The most used oneliners that I use

#Find what Lync Services are running
Get-CsWindowsService -ExcludeActivityLevel | ft Name, Status
#Start any stopped services
Get-CsWindowsService -ExcludeActivityLevel | where {$_.Status -like "Stopped"} | Start-CsWindowsService

#Find all users that are enabled for Lync and have a LineUri, sort them by LineUri, display displayname and LineUri
Get-CsUser -Filter {LineURI -ne $Null} | sort -Property LineURI | ft DisplayName,LineURI

#Quickly find and open the share folder for the Lync pool
Invoke-Item(Get-CsService -FileStore | Select-Object -ExpandProperty UncPath)

Scripts

There are a lot of scripts that is created and expand on Lync Server PowerShell functionality and and some that simplifies working with Lync as well as monitors the solution. Below are some of my favourite scripts. Please let me know of other epic scripts out there.

Set-Lync2010Features.ps1

A script to install prerequisites on Server 2008 R2 before you start install Lync Server on the OS.  You can download the resource kit tools, Silverlitght and other tools easily. You even have som post deployment options in the script as well. This script is highly recommended and I use it in every deployment.

List-UnusedNumbers.ps1

A scripts that read unassigned numbers and depends on you having put you entire number serie there. It will find all numbers assigned to users, devices and features in Lync and find what numbers are available in any given unassigned numbers series. This is a script that saves you the pain of managing available numbers in an excel sheet.

Set-GlobalVoiceRouting.ps1

This script is for demo or initial deployments only. It is created for norwegian rules and genereates an easy way to dial out through one gateway and has the usual normalization rules for Norway. To edit the script and find the nomralization rules for your country see the Dialing Rule Optimizer.

Reset-UserPolicies.ps1

This script is used in an OCS to Lync migration scenario. It will reset all policies to $Null so that they use Global or Pool level policies for External access, Voice Policy and so on. The reason for this is that all users should use what you define for Lync and not what you inherit from OCS.

Get-CsConnections.ps1

This script lists user connections, client versions and the distribution of users in a load balanced scenario

Monitoring OCS and Lync Peak Call Capacity

Script to monitor how many concurrent calls a particular OCS or Lync Mediation Server is handling. The script grabs the counters for inboud and outbound calls, parses their values, adds them together, and dumps the output into a CSV file. A good tool to find how many concurrent calls you have on your deployment

Update-AdPhoto.ps1

A script that enables you to import AD photos from file and store it in the thumbnailPhoto attribute. It is a central feature in Lync to show a photo of users

New-SipContact.ps1

A script to enable users to search for external contacts and Video Conferencing endpoints from Lync. It creates a contact in AD and adds the SIP address to the msRTCSIP-PrimaryUserAddress so it will be synced to the addressbook in Lync.

Scripting Tips

There is a lot of techniques used for scripting. The best script tips I know of I will list here.

Use Write-Debug

Lets you easilly define debug lines that can test variables and logic in you script that is good to use when developing the script but that not need to be there when it is used in production. When you want to debug the script you change the $DebugPreference from ‘SilentlyContinue’ to ‘Continue’. Then all Write-Debug lines will be displayed.

$DebugPreference = 'Continue'

$var = Read-Host "Enter a computer name"
Write-Debug “’$var’ contains $var“

$DebugPreference = 'SilentlyContinue'

Use Functions

Functions are scripts in scripts. If it is certain things you need to do more than once in you script, make it a function with an input and output. I have also seen functions being used to organize your script in a better way to make it easier and more ordered to view.

Function Do-Something ($computername,$domainname) {
	# function code goes here
}

Resources

The Official Lync PowerShell Blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/csps/p/categories.aspx
The Official Lync PowerShell Blog Cmdlet Descriptions: http://blogs.technet.com/b/csps/archive/2010/07/16/refallcmdlets.aspx
MVP Pat Richard’s Blog: http://www.ehloworld.com/category/powershell

Lync Server 2010 Troubleshooting

The goal of this session is to help you understand what troubleshooting tools that are at your disposal and will show them in an actual scenario. When troubleshooting a solution as Lync Server 2010 it is smart to know how things work as well. Therefore this session will also touch upon how the Lync SIP server works and what the Lync Edge server actually is.

View the video and download the slides

Lync Server 2010 Integrations

This session will take a look at all the differente integrations with Lync Server 2010 and how they play out. Expect to get a good overview of the possibilities available to enhance the experience of Lync. This session will not contain that many demos but will focus on pros and cons with the different types of integrations.

View the video and download the slides

Also take a look at the other Lync sessions by Martin Lidholm

• Telephony with Lync on the Nordic market
• Lync Server 2010 Mobile Clients

I also did a Flash Talk at the Microsoft Booth demonstrating how to roll out Custom Presence States using Set-CsClientPolicy and also how to set it in registry

My role as a V-TSP is to provide technology overviews, proofs-of-concept, technical demonstrations, and technology assessments for Microsoft customers. The V-TSP program demands that the partner have the gold competency and that the provided resource is highly skilled and certified within the area of expertise.

I am really looking forward to work even more closely with Microsoft and make sure their customers implement Microsoft Lync and the Unfied Communications proftfolio to the fullest by combining the broad best-of-breed UC technologies from Atea together with Microsoft.

Here is some information I found regarding the V-TSP program

The Microsoft Virtual Technology Specialist Program (V-TSP) is a select group chosen from the elite in Microsoft’s partner community, whose focus is to augment Microsoft’s internal Technology Specialist team. Their primary role is to communicate the value of Microsoft Solutions to customers and to provide architectural guidance for Enterprise Integration solutions. The Microsoft V-TSP program was designed to create a deeper relationship with Microsoft Partners, the Product Teams at Microsoft Corporate, and Regional Microsoft Offices, in order to provide highly skilled solution specialists to Microsoft customers. It is designed to enable a high performance team of partner-based resources to deliver pre-sale activities and resources to empower customers and help them meet their solution and integration needs.

V-TSPs are chosen by Microsoft because of their superior architectural, development, consulting, and customer interfacing skills. Microsoft utilizes these type of individuals in partnership with the Microsoft regional Offices, in pre-sales efforts to secure Microsoft solution opportunities. This includes meeting with Microsoft customers, participating in customer visits with Microsoft representatives, as well as, participating in broad reach events like presenting training and seminars to Microsoft customers.

Microsoft V-TSPs have direct access to online resources and documentation and resources that are usually solely reserved for the Microsoft internal teams. They also have early access to extensive information about all new Microsoft product releases, which benefit Atea and Microsoft customers.