What the Latency Gaps Report shows

The Latency Gaps Report is easy to confuse with the Agent Latency Report, but it answers a different question. Where the Agent Latency Report shows how high the response times were, the Latency Gaps Report shows where the log went silent entirely. A gap is a missing segment — a period where an Agent should have been sending keep-alive requests but the server received nothing. These silent periods are often the direct cause of agents reporting that their screen froze or that they were unexpectedly logged out.

What a latency gap is

VICIdial expects a stream of Latency log entries from each logged-in Agent throughout their shift. When that stream has an unexplained break — no entries for a stretch of time while the agent session is still marked active — the system flags that break as a latency gap.

The gap itself is logged with a start time, an end time, and a duration. Short gaps of a few seconds are common and usually harmless — a browser tab that was briefly backgrounded, a momentary network hiccup. Longer gaps, especially those lasting tens of seconds or more, are where things go wrong for the agent.

How the report is structured

The Latency Gaps Report requires that latency gap logging be enabled on your system. Once enabled, the report can be run for a single day and shows data for all agents or for one agent at a time. Like the Agent Latency Report, it includes a chart that plots gaps across the day, which makes it easy to see whether gaps are clustered at a particular time or scattered throughout the shift.

Each gap entry in the data table shows the agent, the server they were connected to, the start and end time of the gap, and the gap duration. The chart view shows all gaps across the day on a timeline, which reveals whether they cluster during particular hours or affect specific agents consistently.

How gaps differ from high latency

stateDiagram-v2
  [*] --> LoggedIn : Agent logs in
  LoggedIn --> Logging : Keep-alives arriving
  Logging --> Gap : No entries for N seconds
  Gap --> Logging : Entries resume
  Gap --> SessionLost : Gap too long, session drops
  Logging --> LoggedOut : Agent logs out cleanly
  SessionLost --> [*]

High latency means slow responses — the Agent screen is responding but taking a long time to do so. A latency gap means no response at all for that period. These have different causes and different effects on the agent.

With high latency, the agent's screen updates slowly but usually continues functioning. With a gap, the agent's browser has lost its connection to the server entirely during that period. When the connection resumes, the screen may show stale data or need to be refreshed. If the gap is long enough, VICIdial may time out the Agent session and force a re-login.

Reading the chart for patterns

When viewing all agents on the chart, look for clustering. Gaps that appear for many agents at the same time point to a server-side or network-infrastructure event — a brief server overload, a network switch issue, or a database lock that blocked all web responses at once. Gaps that appear for one agent consistently, while others show clean logs, point to that agent's local setup.

Also note the gap duration distribution. Frequent short gaps for one agent suggest a flaky Wi-Fi or VPN connection. A single long gap for many agents suggests a server-side event that lasted until the underlying cause resolved.

Where this report fits in your monitoring routine

The Latency Gaps Report is most useful when agents report screen issues that you cannot reproduce. Pull the report for the agent and the day in question and look for gaps coinciding with the time of the complaint. If you find them, you have a concrete starting point for the investigation rather than a vague description of a frozen screen.

For the broader context of health monitoring across your server, start with the server health and capacity guide. For a look at the backend processes that should be running continuously for agents to stay connected, see how to monitor backend processes in VICIdial.

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