[asterisk-dev] HINTS/SIP NOTIFY how to write a monitoring APP

[James Gardiner]

Hi, Asterisk development Team,
I was wondering if some one who is more on top of the code could tell me 
if....

I was considering putting some time into writing a program that Monitors 
extensions from a PC.
Ie a small app in the system tray.  Now this would not be too hard if I 
use asterisk-panel and talk directly to the perl server engin like the 
web page/flash does. However, I see this is a very bad implementation 
overall. (Server load and traffic generation is a little high and could 
be an issue with a lot of monitoring clients.)

Now we have HINTS / SIP NOTIFY, which appears to be the correct way to 
do this.

Now, to attach to the HINTS, you need to be talking SIP and 
register/NOTIFY your interest with asterisk..
As such, if I only wanted to monitor calls using hints, would I need to 
do a full SIP protocol login?
Would I need to make a SIP account for monitoring for every PC I want to 
monitor the hints? (Can I use the one account for all clients)

I suspect this is the case from what I understand (have read so far) of 
the SIP protocol and NOTIFY.

Can some one with more knowledge shed some light on this?  Is thisi the 
case, and or, can you see a better way to do this?

Thanks,
James