I've been trying to get my head around some statistics and reporting of Asterisk channels, and I'm having a fairly difficult time of it. I currently have no way (as an example) of seeing what codec my IAX calls are using, or seeing how many rings I typically have on an inbound call before pickup (hint: both of these things have economics associated with them.)
I have an idea for how to make this data available to the dialplan, and from there into the various other logic and output methods that may be built by various administrators. The idea is similar in nature to the /proc filesystem in Linux (love it or hate it) or maybe even similar to an SNMP MIB (love it or hate it even more.) This is fairly simple, extensible, and can (probably) be integrated into the existing code without too much difficulty (but I speak from the lovely green fields of non-programmer land.)
This data is available from the console:
gw1*CLI> show channel SIP/2109-996a
-- General --
Name: SIP/2109-996a
Type: SIP
UniqueID: 1089572177.51
Caller ID: Joe Bobbyraesmithson <2109>
DNID Digits: 918005551212
State: Up (6)
Rings: 0
NativeFormat: 256
WriteFormat: 8
ReadFormat: 4
1st File Descriptor: 37
Frames in: 14
Frames out: 36
Time to Hangup: 1089582977
-- PBX --
Context: from-desktop2
Extension: 918005551212
Priority: 1
Call Group: 0
Pickup Group: 0
Application: Dial
Data: Zap/4/18005551212
Stack: 0
Blocking in: ast_waitfor_nandfds
I'd like to have some of that data available in an astdb type format:
channels/SIP/2109-996a/Unique-ID channels/SIP/2109-996a/Caller-ID channels/SIP/2109-996a/DNID-Digits channels/SIP/2109-996a/State channels/SIP/2109-996a/Rings channels/SIP/2109-996a/NativeFormat channels/SIP/2109-996a/WriteFormat channels/SIP/2109-996a/ReadFormat [etc, etc, etc]
You may not see the applications for this immediately, but I can think of several times when this could have saved me a lot of work and headaches in the past. As an example, I could have used this to transfer G.711 calls to a different and higher bandwidth server than my iLBC calls, since I would have been able to discern between the two codecs. Making this very interesting data available in the dialplan would create large new areas of opportunity for those wishing to really take Asterisk to new realms of custom configuration and data collection.
In this manner, it could be possible for channels to "know" about the state of other channels in the system, and their variables at that moment. The format of this type of system should be fairly flexible (i.e.: not a bunch of distinct ${VARIABLES} cluttering up the landscape) and it should be easily extensible. A filesystem-like method seems to be well-suited for this task, and perhaps more importantly, it is already something that is familiar to the Asterisk community (and certainly to the Linux community, whose advocates seems to _live_ for this kind of data structure.)
This could quickly be applied to IAX, SIP, MGCP, ZAP, and other channel types. I suspect that initially all that would be required would be to duplicate whatever is output in the "show channel <chan-name>" syntax. Combined with some of the new dialplan-driven manager commands, some of this stuff could easily be just dumped right back out to the manager interface. Or added to a summary on the database CDR outputs. Or pushed into a text file. Or whatever.
Some additional data I'd like to see included that is currently not available:
channels/SIP/2109-996a/last-host-IP : IP address of transmitter of this SIP message (taken from IP header, and not from DNS or anything inside of the SIP message)
channels/SIP/2109-996a/origin-IP : IP address of origin of this SIP message (extracted from SIP header)
channels/SIP/2109-996a/bytes-in : bytes of traffic in for this channel leg
channels/SIP/2109-996a/bytes-out : bytes of traffic outbound for this channel leg
There might even be a market for data residing in the "registration" database, like:
registrations/SIP/2109/last-host-IP : the IP address this host was last seen on
registrations/SIP/2109/registered : a binary (0 or 1) flag as to the current registration status of this UA
registrations/SIP/2109/AOR : the address of record of this UA (might be different than 2109, as an example)
registrations/SIP/2109/expire-time : UNIX timestamp of last successful registration expiration
It would be pretty cool to dial an extension, and have the system say "I'm sorry, I can't locate extension 2 1 0 9. I last saw that extension at 3:30 PM, Tuesday the 16th but they're not on line now. Press 3 to leave them a message, and I'll deliver it via email. Press 5 and I'll try to ping that host to see if it's up." (this is a hypothetical example; please do not comment on the usefulness or non-usefulness of this example.)
JT
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