The Instinct: Just Pull Data in Real Time
When you’re managing phone systems, the obvious ask is “show me what’s happening right now.” And the obvious implementation is to hit every 3CX instance constantly — every few seconds, pull fresh data, display it on the dashboard.
It sounds right. It’s also a terrible idea at scale.
What Happens When You Poll 3CX Constantly
Every API call to a 3CX instance consumes resources on that system. CPU cycles, memory, network I/O. A single admin refreshing a dashboard every 5 seconds is barely noticeable. But here’s where it breaks down:
Multiple admins, same systems. Your team has three people looking at the same phone systems dashboard. Without coordination, that’s three separate sets of API calls hitting the same 3CX instances on independent intervals. The PBX doesn’t know these requests are redundant — it processes each one. Scale that to 10 admins across 50 phone systems and you’re generating thousands of unnecessary API calls per hour.
Compounding load during incidents. The moment something goes wrong is exactly when everyone opens the dashboard. Peak attention means peak load on the systems you’re trying to diagnose. You’re making the problem worse by looking at it.
Reliability degrades under pressure. 3CX instances under heavy load return data slower. Slower responses mean longer-held connections. Longer connections mean more concurrent requests stacking up. It’s a feedback loop that can turn a minor issue into an outage. Caused by your monitoring tool.
How Live Data Mode Works
Controvo takes a different approach. Instead of every admin independently pulling from 3CX, we use a shared data layer with two modes:
Default Mode: 10-Minute Refresh
Phone system data refreshes every 10 minutes. This covers the vast majority of day-to-day monitoring. You don’t need second-by-second updates to see that a system is healthy, a trunk is registered, or disk space is fine. The data is always recent enough to act on, and the load on your 3CX instances is minimal.
Live Data Mode: 1-Minute Refresh for 10 Minutes
Flip the switch and Controvo pulls fresh data every minute for 10 minutes, then automatically returns to default. This is for when you’re actively troubleshooting — you want faster updates without committing to a permanent polling interval that wears on your systems.
The 10-minute window is deliberate. It’s long enough to diagnose most issues, short enough that you can’t accidentally leave it running and forget about it.
One Refresh, Every Admin
Here’s what makes this work at scale: every admin looking at the phone systems table shares the same refresh interval. Controvo pulls the data once and distributes it to everyone.
- Admin A enables Live Data Mode? Admin B sees the faster updates too.
- Five people staring at the dashboard during an outage? Still just one set of API calls to 3CX.
- Nobody looking? The default 10-minute interval runs quietly in the background with near-zero impact.
This is fundamentally different from each browser tab independently hammering the PBX. The number of admins online has no effect on the load hitting your 3CX instances.
Why This Matters for MSPs
If you’re managing 3CX for multiple clients, you care about two things: visibility and stability. Constant real-time polling gives you visibility at the cost of stability. Infrequent polling gives you stability but leaves you blind during incidents.
Live Data Mode gives you both. Stay in default mode for routine monitoring. Flip to live when you need it. Pair it with custom alerts and thresholds to get notified about the issues that matter. Your 3CX instances stay healthy either way.
Try It
Live Data Mode is available now on the Phone Systems dashboard. Look for the toggle in the top right. Already in the pilot? Log in and try it. Not yet? Apply for the pilot to get early access.