FAQs

I already have access to diagnostic tools via the Partner Portal – how is Eclipse Sentinel any different?

Partner Resellers do have access to some diagnostics via the Portal but this is very limited. The current access doesn’t give resellers a view of their entire connectivity estate, making it much harder to diagnose issues and clearly understand a problem. Eclipse Sentinel provides whole estate status, clearly displayed via the dashboard. Interactive maps give a quick geographical view whilst exchange-by-exchange view options show more details. Sentinel also allows you to set alerts to be informed of issues 24/7, giving you peace of mind and freedom from constant monitoring.

What exactly does Eclipse Sentinel do?

Eclipse Sentinel is a web based monitoring tool providing information on the Eclipse ADSL platform, down to individual exchange and connection level. Specifically, it provides information such as:

• Incidents and issues on the Eclipse ADSL platform
• The general health of the Eclipse ADSL platform
• Exchange-level status
• Automatic alerts

I am using Eclipse Sentinel already for free – what happens now?

We provided a free trial of Eclipse Sentinel to many customers during our testing phase but we have now released the commercial version and any customers wishing to continue using the software will be charged according to the rates published here.

What’s the difference between Sentinel Lite an Sentinel Premium?

Sentinel Lite is a limited version of Sentinel Premium. You will receive full connectivity estate view but not as much exchange detail. Sentinel Premium offers greater monitoring and diagnostic tools and also provides in-depth reporting on usage, radius logs, sync speeds and latency. Sentinel Premium will also notify you of planned maintenance work and major service outages.

How am I charged?

Both Sentinel Lite and Sentinel Premium have an annual fee for access to your personal dashboard. Alerts are charged on top of the annual fee on a line by line basis.

How long a contract do I need to sign up to?

Both Sentinel packages require an annual contract for access but you can sign up for alerts on a month by month basis.

What information do the Eclipse Sentinel alerts offer me?

An alert message will tell you:

• When a line is down
  • Username/customer name
  • Time of failure
  • Exchange name/code
  • Indication of where the fault is likely to have occurred
• When a line recovers
  • Username/customer name
  • Time of recovery
  • Exchange name/code
• When a BT exchange recovers
• An update on fix time

How will Sentinel display the information?

Firstly, the header of the page will contain information and a couple of useful tools 

The centre section shows information about your account, who you are logged in as, a connection

To the right hand side you will see two text boxes, the top one allows you to enter a specific username and jump straight to the Connection Information tab for that connection. The lower box keeps a history of all tabs you have visited, once you have loaded a tab you can click the little blue arrow to see your history and the jump click to load that tab again.

Secondly, Sentinel uses a number of colours to identify problems and status. 

The different sections have specific criteria for each colour status, so to find out exactly what it means look at the relevant key, but as a rule you can use the 'General Key' as an indicator of status for whatever you are looking at.

The Main Dashboard displays all your account information

1. Interactive Status Map

The Map shows all of the connections on your account, each marker represents a connection and the colour indicates the status. Please see the 'Colour Key' for more information. The map is interactive, you can zoom in and out and drag the map around to look at a particular area, and you can click on any marker to load more detailed information for that specific connection.

The map icons for a connection that is offline will appear larger than the others to draw attention to connections that are down. Map icons for connections that have been offline over 7 days or have never been online are smaller so that they do not stand out against normal connections. Postcode data for connections is only accurate to a street level so if there is more than one connection at the same postcode then icons may overlap, for this reason icons are semi-transparent so you should be able to tell when more than one is stacked at the same location. We do try our best to make sure the geodata is accurate but obviously from time to time we do get it wrong, if you find a connection that is clearly marked in the wrong place then please get in touch, let us know the connection username and we will do our best to correct it quickly.

2. Customer Status

This section gives you a quick visual overview of your account so you can see at a glance if there are any account wide issues.

The health bars show how many of you connections are online from your total, the top bar represents the account as a whole, with the two lower bars showing health for individual providers. This is useful for identifying when a problem affects a single supplier or all of your connections.

The Customer status box and health bars will change colour to alert you of problems with your account if too many connections are offline. Please see the 'Colour Key' for more information.

Note: depending how you connections are provisioned you may not have connections with both providers.

3. Connection Overview Control

This little box gives a quick breakdown of how many connections are in each status and the tick box allows you to remove or add groups to the Interactive map and the Connections list.

Unticking a box will remove all connections in that status group from the display, useful for allowing you to focus on a particular group if you have a large number of connections.

4. Customer Exchanges

This will display a list of the Exchanges you have connections on, along with the health status of the exchange. This list by default is limited to the 6 exchanges that have the most connections on, but can be expanded to show the entire list. The Exchange status box, and health bars will change colour to indicate if there is a problem to be aware of.

Each Exchange box will show the Exchange Names, Exchange Code, how many users we (Eclipse) have on that exchange and how many connections you have on that exchange. To the right hand side you will see health bars for the exchange. You can click on the Exchange name to open the Exchange Information tab to get more detail on a particular Exchange.

The top bar shows the overall health for the exchange based on the number of Eclipse connections online of the total. Below this are two bars representing the individual health for our BT and Tiscali lines. This allows you to see if a problem is specific to one provider or the exchange as a whole.

5. Connections List

This table appears at the bottom of the Dashboard and is a list of all of the connections registered to your account, along with various pieces of information about that connection. Lets look at the information column by column to explain what is displayed:

Status online/offline: This shows whether the connection is online or offline, the colour of the status box will give you an indication as to how long the connection has been in that state. (please refer to the colour Key for more information)

Status stable/unstable: This shows whether the connection appears to be intermittent or not. If a connection drops and reconnects frequently during a short space of time then this will change to 'unstable' to alert you or a potential problem.

Time in state: This shows you exactly how long Sentinel has seen the connection to be online or offline for. Keep an eye on this for connections that dropped at the exact, or similar, times as it can indicate a wider issue.

Username: This is the connection username associated with the ADSL connections, you can click on this to load the Connection information tab for more detailed connection information.

Telno: This is the telephone number of the ADSL connection.

Type: This is the type of account you have with us, this should be the same for all your connections.

Customer: This is the Account name you have registered with us and like type, should always be the same for all connections.

Provider: This shows whether the connection is provided using a BT wholesale line or a Tiscali LLU/Datastream line. This is important for being able to identify when an outage affects only one provider.

Circuit Type: This identifies the type of circuit the connection is provisioned on. This allows you to see when problems might affect just a single circuit type with a provider.

6. Connection Information Tab

Connection status

The connection status box shows you information like the telephone number, postcode, circuit type, and time the connection has been in the current state, this gives you a quick at-a-glance overview of how the connection is doing. If there is a problem then the status box will change colour to reflect this.

Please refer the 'Colour Key' for more information about colour and status indicators.

Connection Alerts

Here you will find a list of all configured alerts for the connection. If there are no alerts set up or you want to add a new alert you can click on 'new alert'. You can select between SMS or email alert and the times between which the alert should be active. This is useful if you want to alert different people at different times of the day.

Once you have added an alert you can change the tolerance level for the connection. This allows you to specify a 'buffer' zone so that you will not receive alerts until the connection has been offline for the specified time period. This is to stop multiple alerts being sent in quick succession as ADSL lines do often disconnect and reconnect after a matter of seconds and this is entirely normal behaviour.

Connection Notes

You can add notes to any connection, these can be used to leave information for other people who log into the tool, or to remind you about something specific to this connection.

To edit notes just click in the box (text will turn red), make your changes and then the notes should save automatically (text will turn green) as soon as you start doing something else.

Nearby exchanges

The Exchange Information tab is very similar to the Dashboard but it will only show information for a specific exchange, and you will find that by default the interactive map is zoomed in and centred on the Exchange, and all health bars relate to the Exchange rather than your account. The main difference is that the list on the right will show Exchanges nearby, this is not exact but works out at roughly 8 mile radius. If you do not have connections on any nearby exchanges then it will not return any results.

Being able to see if other exchanges nearby are experiencing issues is very useful as sometimes wide area faults can affect groups of exchanges but not the entire network.