In customer care, the ability to monitor operational performance in real time is a prerequisite for ensuring efficiency and service quality. The realtime dashboards enable supervisory teams to instantly view queue status, agent workload, customer wait times and aggregate productivity metrics. This instant visibility enables rapid intervention in case of anomalies or traffic spikes, optimizing resource allocation and reducing dropouts.
What is a Realtime Dashboard for contact center
A realtime dashboard is a live monitoring tool that provides instant access to key call center metrics, allowing KPIs, agent activity, and call performance to be tracked in real time. This type of centralized interface aggregates data from multiple communication channels, providing a unified view of current operations through interactive widgets, dynamic charts and detailed tables.
Key metrics of realtime monitoring
The metrics tracked by a realtime dashboard fall into several operational categories:
- Agent metrics: number of operators logged in, paused, available, engaged in conversation, and with scheduled breaks
- Queue metrics: calls or interactions on hold, average wait time, average handling time, response rate, and abandonment rate
- Productivity metrics: managed vs. unmanaged calls, time distribution of interactions, SLAs, and threshold violations
- System metrics: status of SIP trunks, device registration, availability of infrastructure resources
XCALLY’s Realtime Dashboards: graphana technology and microservices architecture
XCALLY has developed a realtime dashboard system based on Grafana, a leading open source data visualization platform, integrated with Prometheus as a time-series database.
Operation is based on a realtime process that intercepts events from theAsterisk Manager Interface (AMI) and publishes metrics to Prometheus. The metrics follow the standards of Prometheus types: Counter (for monotonically increasing values such as daily answered calls), Gauge (for variable values such as the number of calls on hold), and Histogram (for statistical distributions such as the duration of conversations broken down by time buckets).
Dashboard Voice: comprehensive monitoring of the voice channel
Realtime Voice Dashboard provides detailed visibility into all aspects of the voice channel. The Inbound Queue Daily Stats section presents aggregated daily KPIs: calls on hold, in conversation, answered, abandoned and unhandled.
Dynamic widgets display real-time agent status (logged, paused, booked pause, idle, talking), the number of calls in queues, and time graphs showing traffic patterns throughout the day. Distribution histograms represent the segmentation of calls by duration (talk time) and hold time (hold time), allowing anomalous patterns to be identified.
The Queue Calls table lists all active calls with complete metadata: unique ID, caller number, alias, routing queue, assigned agent, total duration, and actual talk time. It is updated every 5 seconds. The Outbound Daily Stats and Outbound Calls sections similarly track outbound manual activity (excluding dialer campaigns), while the Cally Square section monitors calls handled by IVR projects.
The Trunks and Telephones tables provide information on the SIP registration status of trunks and telephone devices.
Dashboard Digital Channels: Chat, Email, WhatsApp and SMS
Realtime Digital Channels Dashboards cover all digital channels supported by XCALLY: Chat, Email, SMS, WhatsApp, Open Channel and Fax. Each channel has a dedicated dashboard with specific metrics for the type of interaction.
For Email and Fax, KPIs include: interactions on hold (waiting), opened by agents (open), managed (managed), unmanaged (unmanaged) and total offered. Theaverage hold time before takeover is calculated, as well as the managed rates (managed rate and unmanaged rate). The Accounts table displays the IMAP/SMTP status of each configured email account, with information on synchronization, incoming/outgoing messages, and status message.
For SMS, WhatsApp and Open Channel, metrics are enriched by distinguishing between agent-opened and bot-opened interactions, reflecting integration with automated conversational systems. The Chat dashboard also includes tracking of interactions abandoned by the customer before connecting with the agent and calculatesaverage management time in addition to wait time.
Temporal graphs of interactions allow monitoring load trends, identifying traffic peaks, and evaluating operational efficiency. The Queues section presents a realtime table with: logged in, active, idle, paused, engaged in other queues (busy) and number of interactions waiting for each digital queue.
Advanced configuration: thresholds, alerts and customized dashboards
Graphana’s advanced features allow you to configure visual thresholds that automatically highlight when a metric exceeds predefined values.
Configuring thresholds requires access in edit mode to the relevant panel, where absolute or percentage values can be defined and each threshold associated with a specific color. Thresholds can be combined with alert rules, but they are configured independently: the former are purely visual, the latter generate active notifications.
Integrated alerting system
Alert rules in Grafana allow you to define conditions that, when met, send notifications through configurable contact points (Email, Slack, Webhook, Microsoft Teams).
Alerts can be linked to specific dashboard panels, making statuses and annotations visible directly on views. This proactive approach transforms monitoring from passive to active, ensuring that abnormal situations are reported immediately to operational managers.
Creating custom dashboards with XCALLY metrics.
XCALLY‘s Custom Dashboardssection exposesall realtime metrics through Prometheus and allows Administrators to create custom dashboards for Supervisors, displaying real-time information as needed by the Contact Center.
Panel widgets, such as counters or charts, are designed to be responsive: whenever a new event occurs, information is sent directly from the server to the widget in real time, updating as the user scrolls.
The creation of custom dashboards can be done in two ways:
- Copy-paste of existing widgets: select a panel from the pre-configured dashboards, copy it (via the three-dot menu) and paste it into a new custom dashboard, keeping original queries and configurations
- Creation from scratch: build new panels by directly querying Prometheus metrics with custom PromQL queries, configuring views, thresholds, and time aggregations as needed specifically
Custom dashboards allow you to aggregate metrics from different channels into a single view, create team- or business process-specific views, and define custom KPIs calculated by combining elemental metrics. Grafana‘s flexibility allows the monitoring interface to be fully adapted to organizational needs.
Operational benefits and historical access to data
Adoption of XCALLY Realtime Dashboards brings concrete and measurable benefits to daily contact center operations.Access to historical data for the current day is a significant improvement over the legacy system, allowing retrospective analysis without waiting for batch report generation.
Load reduction on MySQL systems comes from the event-driven architecture that eliminates repetitive queries to the operational database. Prometheus serves as a dedicated persistence layer for time-series, optimized for high-frequency writes and aggregate reads, freeing up resources on the transactional database for processing core system tasks.
Customization through custom queries allows extracting specific insights by combining multiple metrics, applying time aggregation functions (rate, increase, avg_over_time) and creating composite indicators.
The interface provides intuitive controls for display management.
XCALLY also provides official Grafana documentation for advanced configurations, recognizing that optimal use of the platform requires familiarity with time-series database concepts, PromQL query language and visualization patterns. For experienced users, this opens up almost unlimited possibilities for customization and integration with other enterprise monitoring systems.
Conclusions: the centrality of realtime monitoring in operations excellence
Realtime Dashboards are a strategic component for any organization that handles significant volumes of multichannel interactions. The ability to instantly view operational status, identify bottlenecks, promptly react to traffic spikes, and verify compliance with SLAs is a tangible competitive advantage in the customer service market.
XCALLY ensures a robust, scalable solution aligned with IT industry standards. The microservice architecture and event-driven approach ensure high performance even in high-load scenarios, while configuration flexibility allows the system to be tailored to the specific needs of each organization.
