There are some tasks that you occasionally run when you manage a contact center - like making sure that some credentials are OK, logging forgetful agents off, managing duplicate data…. - that we found ourselves repeating every once in a while. So we decided to automate them - and a very handy place happened to be Uniloader.

Therefore, together with the different Linux binaries you use to set it up on your Asterisk/Freeswitch server, we started to distribuite binaries for Windows and MacOS too.

When you download the TGZ file, you can find them under bin - uniloader.exe is for Windows and uniloader_osx for Mac. Copy the right one to a folder of your choice. It requires no install - it just works when called from a shell.

But why should you want to do that?

Well, because the Uniloader is a kind of Swiss-army knife for a number of tasks that will come in handy when running a QueueMetrics system - and performing them from your workstation might be easier than logging in to the server it usually runs on.

For example, it has a lot of tools for diagnostics.

  • Want to make sure that your Asterisk AMI or Freeswitch ESL credentials are correct? uniloader test ami or uniloader test fsw-esl will do the trick.
  • Need to assess whether your QueueMetrics or QueueMetrics Live instance is able to receive data? uniloader test upload.
  • Have a MySQL/MariaDB or Postgres system that you are not sure is remotely reachable? uniloader test mysql and uniloader test postgres will do.
  • Not sure what is going wrong with your remote AudioVault recordings storage? uniloader test audiovault will explain what is being found (or not), and why it is so.
  • You can even use it to test a regular expression with uniloader test regexp, passing multiple input strings to see which ones match, and how long it takes to perform those matches - so you can use the most efficient regexps and be sure that they work as expected.

But there is more - if you run a local QueueMetrics system, you can connect to its database and…

  • By issuing uniloader user you can check, search, create and modify users and user classes in bulk.
  • You can get diagnostics on stored data using uniloader qmdb info.
  • You can export your queue_log database, fully or in part, to a queue_log file using uniloader qmdb export.
  • You can get rid of duplicate call records using uniloader qmdb dedupe.
  • And you can remotely view the configuration of your FreePBX, Issabel or FusionPBX system, and also turn it into a ready-to-go QueueMetrics configuration, with uniloader pbxinfo.

And after you checked that you can connect to your Asterisk system via AMI…

  • You can log-in or log-off all agents that match specific patterns using uniloader asterisk queue-add and uniloader asterisk queue-kick. For example, you may want to log off all agents that are supposed to work the day shift if they forgot to do it themselves.
  • You can can safely have agents removed and added again to queues, in order to produce the appropriate records but without downtime, by issuing an uniloader asterisk queue-replicate.

All of these actions - and more - can be run from the command line, and include their own documentation. A full description is available for each of them on the Uniloader User Manual. As an extra bonus, you can easily script them - for example, you can create a script to log off all agents from 100 to 139 but not 140, and you can run it in a second every time you need it.

So, next time you have some troubleshooting to do, make sure you start on the right foot by using the right tool.

QueueMetrics References

QueueMetrics software is available on premise or as a cloud hosted service for FreePBX, Yeastar S PBX, Grandstream, Issabel, FusionPBX and many other Asterisk and Freeswitch distros.

For more technical information please refer to the User Manual.

Visit www.queuemetrics.com for a free 15 days full-featured trial.

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