Unified Communications Analytics 8.7 - Deployment Guide

Adding and configuring data sources

You can configure the data sources to create the data collections that collect information from different environments. The workflow to add data sources and set up data collection is similar for each target environment.

1	Click the gear icon on the home page side bar.

You must add data sources for each target environment that you have created. So if you have two Active Directory forests added as target environments, you would add the same data sources for each target environment.

For performance reasons, you can add multiple data sources of the same type to distribute the collection load or for different platform versions. For example, you would add an Exchange configuration data source for your Exchange 2010 servers and an Exchange configuration data source for your Exchange 2013/2016/2019 servers.

You can use the rename option to rename each data source so that it reflects the information that is being collected. For information about renaming data sources, see Renaming a data source .

After a data collection is created and is running on a regular basis, you can modify the collection. For example, you could select additional types of data to be collected.

For data sources that require an LDAP connection, auto-discovery is used by default to determine the domain controller that is used. However, for a large environment, you might want to explicitly specify a pool of domain controllers to be used rather than using auto-discovery.

For example, in a large environment you might configure six or more Exchange Configuration data sources, several Tracking Logs data sources, and several IIS Logs data sources. If all the data sources use auto-discovery for the LDAP connection, the data sources would tend to use the same domain controller. To avoid this situation, you can specify a pool of domain controllers to be used for certain collections to spread the gathering load.

If you decide to specify a pool of domain controllers, UC Analytics will resolve the LDAP connection to the first available domain controller. If several different data collections use the same pool with the same sequence of domain controllers, the data source collections may all resolve to the same domain controller. For this reason, you should vary the first domain controller that is specified when you specify a pool of domain controllers for a collection.

The following data sources require LDAP connections:

Recommendations for collecting from Office 365

Many of the data sources that collect from Office 365, including Exchange Online (hybrid or native), use remote PowerShell to collect the data from Office 365. You must specify the account is used to connect to Exchange Online when you configure the data source.

It is recommended that you specify a different account for the PowerShell credentials that are used for each Exchange Online or Office 365 data source that you configure.

How often do collections update the data?

By default, each data collection has a default job interval set. When you configure a data collection, you have the option of changing the schedule for that collection to a different run interval or to an explicit time every x days. For some types of data, the data is collected only once a day regardless of the set schedule so the new data will not be available in insights until the following day.

Essentially, there are two types of data source collections that you can schedule:

For each data source collection that you configure, you have the option of setting an explicit schedule (run at a specific time every x days). The main advantage of setting an explicit schedule for a data source collection is that it allows you to have jobs run separately over different time periods. This option is useful for staggering when jobs run in environments with a large number of configured data source jobs.

Some of the data collections update each time that the collection job is run. For these data collections, only the data that changed from the previous job run is gathered. The data collections that update the data that changed since the last job run are as follows:

Some data collections take a once-a-day “snapshot” of the data even if they are scheduled to run more than once a day. Data collections that gather data only once a day are follows:

Additionally, there are data collections that run in the background and update data only as needed:

For more information, see How often do the data collections actually gather data and when do they run? .

Viewing the collection job status

After the data collection start date, specified on the Data Collection page, the UC Analytics data collections begin to gather information. To view the progress of the collection jobs and to see if there are any errors during the collections, click View Data Collection Status at the top right of the Data Collections page.

By default, UC Analytics only shows the status from the last job run for each data source (Most recent / running). If a collection job shows errors or warnings, you can view the details in the Details pane at the bottom. Use the Show errors only check box and the Show warnings only check box to select whether you want to only errors, only warnings, or both errors and warnings.

Using the filter options, you can filter for a specific data source or job status to determine if a data collection has been running correctly. You can also narrow the returned results by specifying a custom date range.

You can filter the job status results to view only jobs that succeeded, jobs that failed, jobs that are currently running, or jobs that completed with warnings. You can also filter for a specific data source (job type).

•	To filter by job status, click in status field and select a status of running, succeeded, failed, or warning.

•	To fitter by the data collection, click in the job type field and select the data source for which you want to see all data collection job status information.

To search for a specific data source, enter part or all of the data source name in the search field.

For information about how often data collections gather data, see How often do collections update the data? .

The UC Analytics keeps 30 days of job status records by default but the job status page can only display 15,000 records. If there are more than 15,000 records in the database, you can filter the results by date range.

By default, the job status page shows the most recent result for each data source collection.

1	Click the beside Most recent only in the date range field

You can download a file that contains the collection job details by clicking the icon at the end of the status row. The download option allows you to save the .log text file to a specific location. This feature is useful for troubleshooting a specific data collection job.

If you want to copy the contents of the job details, double-click on the row that contains the details you want. The Details Copy option displays and you can copy the details and paste the text into a separate document.