6. Monitoring System Usage
Watching FaxFacts Run
The screen display on the machine running FaxFacts can provide hours of entertainment for those who like watching status messages appearing and seeing the ebb and flow of transactions in progress. More seriously, it can also provide helpful information about the progress of a call.
Both DOS and NT versions of the FaxFacts server engine have a text-mode scrolling display which shows a selectable amount of data about the progress of the program. Under Windows NT, this display is normally hidden, without even an icon, and the status display appears instead on a graphical window. This NT display has additional features, such as the ability to scroll back the display and also to change display and debugging options dynamically. Some of the display options can also be set by function keys, in which case they apply equally to the DOS and NT versions.
If you have a caller who has problems accessing your fax-on-demand system you can ask him or her to call in while you are watching the status display. If the problem is not apparent from the single-line status display, you can turn on the display of state and event messages. This provides an additional level of detail, including the caller’s response to each prompt and the full list of states through which the software passes. You can also open an error-log file to capture all the messages on disk. If you have a VGA monitor under DOS, switching to 50-line mode before starting FaxFacts will allow you to see more scrolling messages at a time; under Windows NT a ‘tall screen’ option on the graphical screen will appear if your screen resolution is sufficient to display a larger status window.
FFMON
FFMON is a supplied Windows program which can monitor the activity of your FaxFacts system from another network machine. It uses the .OMA file (operations monitor alert) which is written by FaxFacts every fifteen seconds when the -OMA command-line flag is set. Because the file is only updated every fifteen seconds the FFMON display does not reflect all events, but it does give you a good idea of what your system is doing. Even if you iconise the small FFMON window it will pop-up with an alert sound if something goes wrong with your FaxFacts system.
Some FaxFacts users have set up a program to watch the OMA file and when it stops being updated, call them on a pager.
Reviewing Fax-on-Demand System Usage
It is most important that you regularly review system usage. Once your FaxFacts system has settled in it is tempting to let it sit quietly in a corner doing its work, but you should resist this temptation if you wish to maintain the quality of your fax-on-demand application.
The FaxFacts log will tell you which are the most frequently downloaded documents. If you use a menu system you should make sure that these documents come early in the menus, so that the user can key ahead. When you find in the logfile to identify a caller who has encountered multiple failed calls, you should occasionally call up and ask them why the call failed, or why they hung up early. Without feedback like this you may miss stamping on small problems experienced by your users.
You should also monitor the log for document numbers which are selected but which result in no pages being sent (the X flag will be shown in the flags field). You might have forgotten to load a document that you have told the user about or which appears in one of your menus.
Whenever you make a change to the way the system operates, you should test it by calling in to the system. If the change involves a user file and you have more than one telephone line, you can logically disconnect the line from the main system and assign the new user number to it for testing purposes.
Dealing with Errors
The nature of fax transmissions is that some will fail. The international fax ‘standards’ are officially only ‘recommendations’, anyway. Monitoring the outcome of FaxFacts calls will highlight any patterns which indicate persistent problems. Your FaxFacts supplier may be able to suggest changes to the driver control parameters to improve certain aspects of performance. FaxFacts allows access to most of the board parameters and the manufacturers configuration files allow access to others.
The FaxFacts software includes many consistency checks and reports on all errors detected in any of the control files. Unless the error makes it impossible to continue processing, FaxFacts will usually abandon the transaction and continue processing valid transactions, so you may not find out about the problem until some time after it has occurred. If there are errors in the FaxFacts program itself which you are unable to resolve, your FaxFacts supplier may ask you to try to duplicate the problem with more comprehensive logging enabled, selected on the ‘advanced’ section of the status screen.