PMS Monitor

The hospitality service works quietly in the background, with no GUI front-end to look at. Instead, DV2000/DV4 provides a client application called PMS Monitor which can be used to view the serial communication traffic between the VMS and the PMS. The figure below shows the main window of this application with a handful of log entries displayed.

Each line in the table represents a single communication exchange between the two systems, including the packet or control character transmitted by the sender and the ACK or NAK character transmitted by the receiver in response. The following fields comprise the data displayed for each exchange:

Column	Description
Date/Time	The date and time this entry was logged. The date format by default is Month/Day/Year and the time format is Hour:Min:Sec.msec.
Port	The port number over which the communication took place. The example above shows a TCP/IP port number (60040). COM ports will fall in the range from 1-255, whereas TCP ports are typically above 1024.
Dir	The direction of the communication, In or Out. In means the message was received from the PMS; Out means it was sent to the PMS.
Packet	The raw packet or control byte received, if relevant. For some entries, this may be blank. In the example above, the first line indicates that a connection with the PMS has been established. There is no actual data transferred at this point, so the Packet column is blank. Note: Non-printable ASCII characters generally cannot be displayed on-screen by most fonts, so PMS Monitor displays them using a special notation: a two-digit hexadecimal value inside of angle brackets. Any hex value between 0x00 and 0x19, inclusive, will be displayed using this notation. In the example above, several of the lines have packets that start with <02> and end with <03>. The <02> notation indicates a single character with the hex value 0x02 (this is the STX character that starts a message packet for most PMS protocols). Likewise, <03> denotes hex value 0x03, the ETX character that ends message portion of the packet for most protocols (in some cases, a checksum byte may follow the ETX character).
Response	The control character sent back to the PMS in response to a message received, or received from the PMS in response to a message sent. Typically, this will either be <06> (an ACK) or <15> (a NAK). If the PMS does not respond within the time allowed (typically a few seconds), this field may display something like (timeout) instead. If the entry is for an event or message where a response is not expected or not relevant, this field will be left blank.
Action	A statement indicating the action taken by the VMS. For inbound packets, this will indicate how the VMS interpreted and processed the message. For outbound packets, it will typically state what type of message was sent. For connection events, it will state the IP address of the PMS that has connected. This occurs only if the hospitality server is configured to use a TCP Server connection (where the VMS is the server that opens the port and waits for the PMS to connect). There will be a corresponding disconnect entry if the PMS closes the connection.
Result	A statement indicating the success or failure of the action indicated in the Action column, from the perspective of the VMS.

Note: If an ellipsis (...) is displayed in one of the columns, that indicates that there is more text than can be displayed in the column. To see the full text for the given field, you may need to expand the width of the column.

Clearing the Window

To clear the data from the window at any time, click the Clear button on the toolbar (the blank page icon) or select View | Clear from the main menu.

Saving the Data

To save the currently displayed data to a comma-separated value (CSV) text file, select File | Save from the main menu or click the Save button on the toolbar (the diskette icon). The first time you do this, the File Save As dialog will be displayed. Navigate to the folder where you want to save the file, enter a filename and click Save to save it.

Any time you select File | Save (or click to Save button) from that point on, PMS Monitor will just overwrite the existing file. If you want to save to a different filename, choose File | Save As from the main menu instead.

Note: All entries logged to PMS Monitor are automatically saved to a database and can be viewed by generating a PMS Activity Log report using the DVReport utility.

Sending Test Packets

PMS Monitor has the ability to signal the hospitality service to send a polling (keep-alive) packet or to send a request for database swap. This feature can be accessed by clicking the send message icon on the toolbar, highlighted below, or by selecting Tools | Send message from the menu.

Click the radio button for the message type that you wish to send. Then click OK to send it.

As noted on the dialog above, the message can only be sent if the protocol supports that message type. If it does not, an error message will be displayed, as shown below:

If the message was successfully sent, an entry for it will appear in the main window.