[asterisk-dev] CQDRs - Call Quality records (was: Bug marshals - won't you take a look...)

[John Todd]

At 2:36 PM -0500 2006/11/2, Jared Smith wrote:
>On Thu, 2 Nov 2006, Stephen Davies wrote:
>>  I posted up a change that gets chan_iax2 to log jitter buffer stats
>>  into the logs regularly during active calls.
>
>I've also responded to the bug (#8188), but I'll repost my comments 
>below as they're likely to get a greater audience of developers:
>
>Interesting... John Todd and I were discussing something similar at 
>AstriCon, but in a more generic sense. What we'd like to see written 
>is CQDR -- Call Quality Detail Records. Think of them as sitting 
>side-by-side the CDR records, but showing information about the Call 
>Quality.
>
>In the case of IAX, we get all kinds of useful information, which we 
>don't currently capture (and your patch logs to the verbose log). In 
>the case of SIP, we have RTCP reports (as well as call quality 
>reports in the BYE messages of some endpoints).
>
>Wouldn't it be cool to see all this information logged to a CQDR table?
>
>-Jared


There was even a talk (which I am ashamed to say I missed) at 
Astricon by Peter Macaulay on call quality monitoring.  He's been 
using wireshark/tethereal (agh!) to collect RTCP information and run 
statistical analysis.  I talked with him briefly on the concept of 
CQDRs, and everyone seems to be in violent agreement that this is 
something that would greatly benefit service providers and large 
enterprise instances of Asterisk.

So, let me drag this monster out of the email archives again to see 
if anyone has an interest in coding something like it:

http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-dev/2004-May/004180.html

Wow, that was a long time ago!  Looks like everyone named "Jared" is 
interested in this stuff.  Anyway, now that we have RTCP, much of 
this data is immediately obvious and should be able to be inserted 
into a CQDR-type record.  Even without RCTP, it is possible to put 
much of this data into the record format - RTCP allows us to extend 
the record and put in the perceptions from BOTH ends of the media 
stream.

Additional concepts that were discussed at Astricon:

   - SNMP values for each RTP session that reflect jitter, RCTP, 
non-RTCP statistics

   - AMI commands to display jitter/RTCP/non-RTCP stats per media stream

   - standard abstraction of CQDRs using the already-written CDR 
abstraction layer (database, flatfile, etc)

   - insertion of "Cisco-standard" statistics into the BYE messages 
for SIP calls (RTP-RxStat/RTP-TxStat)

   - collection of "Cisco-standard" statistics from BYE messages of 
peers/clients and insertion into the CQDR

JT