What to watch on your VICIdial server every day

You just got your VICIdial server running, agents are dialing, and now you are wondering: what am I actually supposed to look at each morning? You do not need a wall of dashboards. You need four numbers and one report, checked once before the shift starts and once at peak. That is the whole routine.

Start with the Server Versions page

The Server Versions page (under Admin Utilities, available to level-9 users) is your quickest morning glance. For every server it lists the load, the channel count, the free disk space, the time, the software version, and whether the server is active. In a single-tenant setup you have one box (see Single tenant), so you are reading one row.

Three things on that row matter before agents arrive. Disk space: if it is filling, your call recordings are the usual culprit (audio of every conversation, see Call recording) and you want to act before it hits zero. Load: a rough gauge of how busy the box is, which should be low and quiet with nobody dialing. Channels: the count of active audio paths through Asterisk (the telephony engine VICIdial runs on, see Asterisk) should be near zero at rest.

Then check the Server Performance Report

The Server Performance Report samples the box every 5 seconds and is the one place that focuses purely on the machine, not on campaigns or agents. The summary line at the top tells you the calls handled during the shift, the total off-hook minutes, the average number of Asterisk channels in use, the average system load, the peak system load, and the split of USER, SYSTEM, and IDLE processor time.

Read it once after the shift to learn your normal. The two numbers worth watching daily are peak system load and average channels in use. Peak load tells you how hard the box worked at its busiest moment. Average channels tells you how many simultaneous audio paths you ran, which tracks how many concurrent calls were live (see Concurrent calls).

Your daily flow

flowchart TD
  A[Open Server Versions page] --> B{Disk space OK?}
  B -->|No| C[Clear or archive recordings]
  B -->|Yes| D[Open Server Performance Report]
  D --> E[Read peak system load]
  E --> F[Read average channels in use]
  F --> G{Both near your normal?}
  G -->|Yes| H[Shift is good to start]
  G -->|No| I[Investigate before agents log in]

One more habit: glance at the Real-Time report once at peak, the live screen showing logged-in agents, their status, and calls waiting (see Real-time report). It is not a server health report, but if agents are stacking up waiting on the dialer while load is high, you have your answer in seconds.

For the longer view, the Maximum System Stats report draws a bar per day for the last 30 days, including most concurrent calls and most concurrent agents, so you can see whether your busy days are creeping up over the month.

If you want the bigger picture of how these pieces fit together, start with the overview in our guide to monitoring VICIdial server health and capacity. Once you know your daily numbers, set up a watcher so you find out about trouble before your agents do, which we cover in how to set up VICIdial uptime monitoring.

If running this routine yourself sounds like one chore too many, our managed VICIdial hosting watches load, channels, and disk for you and provisions a tuned server in under a minute. See what is included on the pricing page.