Avaya Support Alternatives? 10

[IGiveGreatDialTone]

My company provides support and service contracts for several hundred Definity, S8700 and S8500 systems that currently have either existing Avaya maintenance contracts or are under warranty from Avaya.

As these contracts expire, we are advising our customers not to renew them due to the extreme cost and lack of any real value from Avaya. We will now support these systems directly without involving Avaya except for upgrades and licensing issues.

We are looking for a reliable way to provide alarm monitoring like "Expert Systems" in-house without relying on a 3rd party monitoring service to notify us when an alarm occurs in the switches.

What do other BusinessPartners do to provide this service or do I have to stick with Avaya?

Any suggestions would be appreciated, Thanks.

Betty Ryan
NOC Administrator

 

[BIS]

http://www.alarmtraq.com/

for a start...

 

[IGiveGreatDialTone]

Thanks BIS, that's just what I'm looking for.

Has anyone else in this forum used Alarmtraq?

- Betty

 

[06238]

Betty, we too provide our own service and I would like to see more feed back on this topic.
Anyone else have any ideas?

 

[phoneman2005]

We use AlarmTraq instead of Avaya. It has saved us thousands over the last year, highly recommended by this user.

 

[IGiveGreatDialTone]

Is it okay to use AlarmTraq for remote alarm monitoring or does Avaya frown on it's use?

Any other BP's using this system?

- Betty

 

[JayNEC]

I have ~50 (fifty) switches being monitored by this application, been using for over a year now.

I have setup two servers, one offsite (colo in a customers switchroom) for reliability. Jim Reilly has always been responsive to problems and comes out with updates regularly. He didn't charge me again for software to setup a second server either.

 

[IGiveGreatDialTone]

JayNEC,

What type of systems do you moinitor? Have you tried to do any SMNP with this system?

 

[Mike2005]

We use AlarmTraq to monitor alarms via INADS modems and SNMP.

The SNMP portion is new and it works good. We monitor about 200 systems via INADS modems and another 100 systems by SNMP. We are currently adding a couple dozen IP Office systems to the list.

To setup AlarmTraq for SNMP, click

http://www.reillytele.com/AlarmTraq/alarmtrax_propertiesSNMP.htm

- Mike

 

[JayNEC]

I haven't messed with SNMP monitoring yet. It just came out.

 

[IGiveGreatDialTone]

I took your advice and I am going to go with Alarmtraq. It seems like the perfect system for our techs and customers.

Thanks JayNEC

 

[IGiveGreatDialTone]

Has anyone else used SNMP alarming for the IP Office or S8700 with alarmtraq?

Betty

 

[avayajoe]

The Avaya BusinessPartner guidelines state that any remote alarm monitoring system such as "Expert Systems" must be able to test the link to the switch on a scheduled basis.

You must be able to prove this to the Avaya auditor in order to comply.

 

[IGiveGreatDialTone]

Hey AvayaJoe,

We had Avaya maintenance for years and they never tested the inads link. Even when we had a real alarm, quite often we would not be notified and nothing was ever done. It was a waste of money.

AlarmTraq will automatically test the INADS link every night if you wish. Each morning I get an email that tells me all the systems that passed and failed in one email message. we test about 150 different systems each night.

We have been using AlarmTraq for about a month now. Anyone looking for alternatives can't go wrong with AlarmTraq.

 

[chuck14]

If you don't have permisions to the systmes-parameters maintenance to change the oss number how can you get this to work? Will Avaya charge you to change the number?

 

[wd9adi]

If you are a long time Avaya user you probably used the Terranova Terminal Emulation products. They have to new system call SOS Save Our Switch. It is an alarm reciever, ticketing and tracking system that has the ability to run a command based on the reception of an alarm. They are moving up fast on what Avaya can do. Worth looking at

http://www.rcsal.com

which is Noel and his brother Greg's company. I used their previous product they developed for Lucent and moving to SOS now. Nice part is that it will support from Version 6 up to S8700 products.

 

[IGiveGreatDialTone]

I looked at SOS but AlarmTraq does more for my money.

 

[Mike2005]

The alarmtraq product is your best choice, it covers all the systems in our customer base fom the old System 75s to the S8700s and everything in between.

It also does the IP Office although we don't have many out there yet. We just recently added a few Octel 350s using the Omnitronix SL81 boxes for alarm monitoring to alarmtraq, works great.

 

[Rick46256]

Thanks BIS, excellent link.

 

[irisngen]

The IRISnGEN alarm monitoring platform from Teltroics works great. i installed it 2 years ago & it has been very reaiable. it works on all Avaya PBX platforms including SNMP.