We basically offer virtual IP Centrex solutions. We are thinking of moving away from Asterisk for most, if not all, of the standard services we offer (e.g. voicemail, forward, follow-me, conference, IVR, auto-attendant, etc) and just keep in Asterisk our call center services.

We use FOP to give, mainly, our call center customers a "real-time" view of what's going on with the phones, agents, etc. in a user-friendly graphical display.

However, we do have a few corporate clients who we have offered FOP as a mean of "digitizing" a receptionist console so the receptionist can see, very quickly and easily, which extensions are busy or not. We are not necessarily interested in the advanced features FOP offers, such as drag-and-drop transfers, forwards, conferences, etc.

So, the question remains, if there is such a tool for SER(OpenSER) + SEMS that allows us to display in "real-time" the status of certain SIP phones. If not available, is there a way to monitor "events" in SEMS that will let us "graph" them in a GUI such that we would know when a particular SIP device is on the phone or not?

I just read about the SNMP module for OpenSER. I wonder if we could just query it, or even better, if it can generate traps based on certain events so we could capture the traps and "graph" them.

Thanks, Daniel

-----Original Message----- From: "Greger V. Teigre" greger@teigre.com Sent: Wed, December 20, 2006 2:26 am To: lists@infoway.net Cc: serusers@lists.iptel.org Subject: Re: [Serusers] Realtime Call Monitoring

You would probably want to use sems to offload your asterisk servers for "routine" tasks. I'm not sure if you would need SEMS in a scenario where you use FOP (which is more targeted towards smaller setups). So, what do you plan to use sems for and do you have a separate need for ser or just as a sems front-end?

I'm sure the sems developers are interested in use cases on monitoring of sems. There are separate mailing lists for sems users and sems developers, see http://iptel.org/sems g-)

lists@infoway.net wrote:

We are Asterisk-only users and currently use Asterisk Flash Operator Panel (http://www.asternic.org/) to get a real-time view of the different phones/extensions, channels, etc.

We are planning on enhancing our setup by adding SER/OpenSER in front of our Asterisk systems and to expand into other venues as well.

If we wanted to use something like SEMS instead of Asterisk for certain services, is there any tool similar to the Flash Operator Panel (FOP) available for SER/OpenSER + SEMS?

I guess we could always continue using FOP with our Asterisk systems fronted by SER/OpenSER. However, for our other plans where we prefer to use SEMS, we would love to see if there is any solution available (free, sponsored, or commercial).

Thanks, Daniel

---

Serusers mailing list Serusers@lists.iptel.org http://lists.iptel.org/mailman/listinfo/serusers

Stefan,

For completeness purposes, please see my just posted response to this thread.

However, if querying SEMS events, or querying RADIUS, or using XMLRPC would all give the same bottom-line information, I would think that using RADIUS is the better and less intrusive way of getting the information. Right?

Thanks, Daniel

On Thu, December 21, 2006 9:49 am, Stefan Sayer said:

Hello Daniel,

it is not complicated to write a module which would translate SEMS internal events to make them available externally. I only wonder whether snmp traps would be the right way to do this.

I guess that radius would be better suited for application layer, and also is more widely used in the context.

XMLRPC could be another choice, as it is probably much easier to use on the other side, but the overhead of creating at least two tcp connections per call and the xml parsing might not be worth it, considering that the media server should not be slowed down by this.

Stefan

lists@infoway.net wrote:

...

We basically offer virtual IP Centrex solutions. We are thinking of moving away from Asterisk for most, if not all, of the standard services we offer (e.g. voicemail, forward, follow-me, conference, IVR, auto-attendant, etc) and just keep in Asterisk our call center services.

We use FOP to give, mainly, our call center customers a "real-time" view of what's going on with the phones, agents, etc. in a user-friendly graphical display.

However, we do have a few corporate clients who we have offered FOP as a mean of "digitizing" a receptionist console so the receptionist can see, very quickly and easily, which extensions are busy or not. We are not necessarily interested in the advanced features FOP offers, such as drag-and-drop transfers, forwards, conferences, etc.

So, the question remains, if there is such a tool for SER(OpenSER) + SEMS that allows us to display in "real-time" the status of certain SIP phones. If not available, is there a way to monitor "events" in SEMS that will let us "graph" them in a GUI such that we would know when a particular SIP device is on the phone or not?

I just read about the SNMP module for OpenSER. I wonder if we could just query it, or even better, if it can generate traps based on certain events so we could capture the traps and "graph" them.

Thanks, Daniel

-----Original Message----- From: "Greger V. Teigre" greger@teigre.com Sent: Wed, December 20, 2006 2:26 am To: lists@infoway.net Cc: serusers@lists.iptel.org Subject: Re: [Serusers] Realtime Call Monitoring

You would probably want to use sems to offload your asterisk servers for "routine" tasks. I'm not sure if you would need SEMS in a scenario where you use FOP (which is more targeted towards smaller setups). So, what do you plan to use sems for and do you have a separate need for ser or just as a sems front-end?

I'm sure the sems developers are interested in use cases on monitoring of sems. There are separate mailing lists for sems users and sems developers, see http://iptel.org/sems g-)

lists@infoway.net wrote:

...

We are Asterisk-only users and currently use Asterisk Flash Operator Panel (http://www.asternic.org/) to get a real-time view of the different phones/extensions, channels, etc.

We are planning on enhancing our setup by adding SER/OpenSER in front of our Asterisk systems and to expand into other venues as well.

If we wanted to use something like SEMS instead of Asterisk for certain services, is there any tool similar to the Flash Operator Panel (FOP) available for SER/OpenSER + SEMS?

I guess we could always continue using FOP with our Asterisk systems fronted by SER/OpenSER. However, for our other plans where we prefer to use SEMS, we would love to see if there is any solution available (free, sponsored, or commercial).

Thanks, Daniel

---

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---

Serusers mailing list Serusers@lists.iptel.org http://lists.iptel.org/mailman/listinfo/serusers

-- Stefan Sayer Media Services Development

iptego GmbH Am Borsigturm 40 13507 Berlin Germany

stefan.sayer@iptego.de www.iptego.de

Bogdan,

This certainly looks interesting. The one thing I like about it, is that if it works, I don't "have to" send all the calls thru SEMS to get status or information about each call.

Now, there is always a chance the OpenSER will never get a BYE message, so the timeout will eventually kick in. In thinking of "developing" a real-time GUI to display this information, I guess we could always take into account that if there is an ongoing dialog and the SIP devices initiates or receives another "call", we may assume that the old dialog was terminated but a BYE was not received. However, in the case where a SIP device handles call-waiting, 3-way calling, or any other multi-calling feature, this assumption will not work. Is this an accurate statement?

If on the other hand, we were to "force" traffic thru SEMS and OpenSER never get the BYE message, I suppose SEMS would take care of properly terminating the call and sending the proper BYE message back to OpenSER (I'm not sure since I'm new to this).

It the above statements/assumptions are correct, I would conclude that usign the dialog module would be more effective than querying SEMS or having a constant socket monitoring traffic (the way FOP does it with *), since it seems to be "less intrusive".

Now, to make an additional comment to Stefan Sayer's email (which I haven't responded to yet), he also suggests to query RADIUS for this information. If my understanding is correct, I believe RADIUS works in OpenSER based on the INVITE and BYE messages and if querying OpenSER would basically give me the same information as querying RADIUS, I guess we could always use some of the already-available open-source tools that give "real-time" RADIUS reporting, as was done back in the good old days of ISPs.

What do you think?

Thanks, Daniel

On Thu, December 21, 2006 6:15 am, Bogdan-Andrei Iancu said:

Hi Daniel,

never used * with FOP, but if you just want to see the ongoing calls (and additional information about them), you can use OpenSER with the "dialog" module - it is present in the current stable version. http://www.openser.org/docs/modules/1.1.x/dialog.html

even more, you can fetch the information via standard interfaces like XMLRPC and even better, via SNMP - these features are present only in the development tree.

regards, bogdan

lists@infoway.net wrote:

...

We are Asterisk-only users and currently use Asterisk Flash Operator Panel (http://www.asternic.org/) to get a real-time view of the different phones/extensions, channels, etc.

We are planning on enhancing our setup by adding SER/OpenSER in front of our Asterisk systems and to expand into other venues as well.

If we wanted to use something like SEMS instead of Asterisk for certain services, is there any tool similar to the Flash Operator Panel (FOP) available for SER/OpenSER + SEMS?

I guess we could always continue using FOP with our Asterisk systems fronted by SER/OpenSER. However, for our other plans where we prefer to use SEMS, we would love to see if there is any solution available (free, sponsored, or commercial).

Thanks, Daniel

---

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