Sunday, August 23, 2015

Cisco Quality Manager 10.5 upgrade issues

I'm sharing several important lessons learned during a Cisco Quality Manager upgrade from 9.0.1.57 to 10.5 SR6, given they are not well documented.  I hope it saves you some time.

Quality Manager administrator access

In environments where you are using MS Active Directory to associate users with recorded devices you may find your self unable to login to the QM administrator's application after the upgrade.  The normal Quality Manager local admin user and password doesn't seem to work, and neither do the AD accounts you've used for logging in as administrators previously. If you are really motivated and change the model to use QM Authentication, the local QM administrator works but now your administrative AD access is gone. 

What to do?

Note there is a new field buried in the Enterprise | Site Configuration | Enterprise Settings form.  You need to actually select and choose to edit one of your Active Directory entries to see it.  Of course you can't do any of this unless you run postinstall.exe because of course, your locked out.

When you choose to edit an Active Directory entry, you will find a field called Admin Group. Mine contained the value QMAdministrator.  I don't know where that value came from because the Admin Group is now actually enforced and represents a MS Active Directory group that contains users that may or may not be Quality Manager system administrators.

First, find or create a AD group that contains your potential QM admins.  Enter the display name of the group in the QM Admin Group field.

Then, when choosing OK you will be presented with a grid of users from that AD group.  Choose one or more to become system admins.  See below.



You're in.

CUCM Recording Server SIP Trunk

If you are using Cisco Built In Bridge recording / Calabrio network recording you will already have a SIP trunk configured in CUCM, pointing to your recording server.  This trunk carries information from CUCM to Quality Manager regarding the DNs that need to be recorded, and from Quality Manager regarding what recording server to use.  There's the rub.  Previously the CUCM pointed the trunk to the Quality Manager recording server and no one thought about it. Of course, you would point it to the recording server because of course that's where the recording are going to go. Right?

Calabrio has changed the basic architecture in 10.5.  You now point the SIP trunk in CUCM to the Quality Manager Base server, not the recording server.  Before you correct this, you might dig around in the QM logs and find references to your QM not receiving SIP invites on the base server and be confused. Why would you need them there? 

Reset your CUCM trunk, start WireSharking stuff, reread all the install and upgrade guides you can find from Cisco's site. Freak out a little.

Then just point the trunk to the Quality Manager base server, rather than the record server where it's been pointing forever. 

See below.


Quality Manager VoIP Devices and Recording Cluster and Signaling Group

New programmatic entities in Quality Manager probably make in more scalable and manageable. New information under Enterprise | Site Configuration | Telephony Groups allow you to parse up and group different recording resources and signalling types.  This is great, but after the upgrade you will need to verify those values have been associated with your VoIP devices correctly.  My experience was that none of my devices had been associated with a Recording Cluster or Signaling Group at all.  That won't work.

Luckily, given all my devices need to be associated with the same Recording Cluster and Signaling Group, it's an easy edit of the entire list.  If your environment has multiple recorders, this might be a more painful process.

Go to Enterprise | Record Server Configuration | VoIP Devices and clean up your mess.

See below.


Enjoy your recordings again.