Port Use Estimation

[jfierro]

I am trying to determine my highest historical simultaneous use of available ports and compare that to my average daily simultaneous port use. Based on the information that I find, I may or may not modify the subcription plan that I currently have to ensure that I never have to worry about exceeding the port and associated burst capacity that is comes with my plan. Is there a way to dertermine this from the Plum Voice Hosting account website or do I have to request this information separately from the Plum Voice support team?

THANKS!

[support]

Hi Jess,

Your IVR sales representative will contact you regarding port utilization. However, it's more important to determine what you need versus what you've used, because it's really two different questions, the latter of which is not reflective of the former.

In order to figure out how many simultaneous ports you need, you should first figure out your needs on the following three questions:

1) How many IVR calls do you plan on queuing at once? You should refer back to your own records for how many calls you've queued at once.
2) How long are those calls going to be? This can be determined with the Plum reporting tool in your IVR hosting account.
3) How much delay is acceptable between when an IVR call is queued and when it's finally dialed? This is really a judgment call on your part. For some customers, 3 minutes is too long to wait. For others, a four hour delay is fine if they're queuing up 10,000 calls.

Once you have addressed these questions, we can walk you through the process of analyzing your IVR call capacity needs.

Regards,
Plum Support

[support]

Hi Jess,

Thanks for your response.

However, there is still some information we need to help you analyze your IVR call capacity needs.

About #1) We still need to know how many IVR CALLS you plan on queuing at once, not ports.

For example, let's say you wanted to queue up 100 calls that are about 30 seconds each and you wanted less than 6 minutes delay for each IVR call. So, 12 calls would be made in those 6 minutes on a single port.

|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__| 12 calls in one port, each block representing a 30s call

Thus, you would want about 8 or 9 ports to handle these 100 queued calls to ensure that there would be no call delay longer than 6 minutes.

So, again, we need to know how many IVR CALLS you plan on queuing at once, not the ports.

About #3) To avoid an unnecessary backlog of IVR calls, you should program a uniqueness check on your backend to drop requests if there's already a call in the queue.

NOTE: You are guaranteed 22 ports of capacity for your account.

Regards,
Plum Support

[jfierro]

Plum Support Team,

Thank You for the update. Actually, determining how many calls will be made at one time is the difficult question (and the primary task we are trying to accomplish).

I am wondering if PlumSupport has historical data relating to our account that shows, definitively, what the maximum number of simultaneous calls that we have had in a que (that were delayed more than 10 seconds) to compare with a daily average. Then we would be able to estimate the number of ports that we need based on real historical information. I want to avoid guessing on the number of queued calls as we have had several months of high volume service from which to draw conclusions.

If there is a way for us to determine these figures, we are very interested in learning how.

I like the idea about building a uniqueness check to reduce the possibility of backlogs, but feel that that measure would not help our customers as each call will provide new information for use in new sessions. So, every call actually needs to go out.

Again--Thanks!

Jess

[support]

Hi Jess,

You could use the reporting tool for your hosting account to show you the total amount of calls made for outbound. Here are the steps you would take to do this:

1) Log into your hosting account
2) Click on the "Reporting" header.
3) Click on the "Create a New Report" button
4) For Output Format, choose "Standard Report" from the drop-down box.
5) For Timeframe, choose custom.
6) For Start Date and End Date, enter the time period that you want to view your report. (For example: If you wanted to view your report for the month of September, you would enter 09/01/2008 for Start Date and 09/30/2008 for End Date)
7) For Report Elements, leave it the way it is.
For "Customize Charts", click on the radio button for "Calls" for "Call Type:".
9) For "Phone Numbers:", scroll down and click on "Outbound".
10) For "Calculation:", click on "Call Count".
11) Click "View Report" to view your report.

From here, you can view the daily number of IVR outbound calls that were made from your account on the chart. That way, you can compare days where you have had a large volume of outbound calls that went out with days of average outbound call usage.

Regards,
Plum Support

[jfierro]

Dear Plum Support Representative,

Thank You for the information above.

I do ususally use the default "simple table" report from the same "Reports" tab that you mentioned to get a quicklook of the daily use. It's very effective and only takes a couple of clicks. I do use the method that you describe above, but only when I need more specialized data.

But, neither of those reports, nor any other report that I've built (or that is offered to build) have given me the information that I originally requested -- historical maximum use of available ports due to simultaneous call requests. I believe that only you can provide that information.

I am wondering if you can provide that information (if yes: please provide it) as well as to know if it not possible for you to determine. That has been my question all along.

Again--Thanks.

Best,
Jess

[support]

Hi Jess,

From our IVR records, we have seen that you have gone over your maximum use of available ports due to simultaneous IVR calls only once, meaning that you have queued too many IVR calls for your allotted 22 ports to handle.

However, we do not provide a record of the maximum number of simultaneous IVR calls that you have had in a queue (where an IVR call was delayed more than 10 seconds). That is something you would have to set up on your backend to keep for your records.

Regards,
Plum Support