[asterisk-dev] Asterisk Beacon Module Proposal

[Matthew Jordan]

Hey everyone -

At the past several AstriDevCon events, we've had an open discussion
about adding a module to Asterisk that would gather anonymous usage
statistics. Said module would be used to help the Asterisk Developer
community better support the users of Asterisk, as we would have some
indication of the modules being used by the reporting segment of the
Asterisk community. There are, of course, a couple of agreed upon
stipulations for such a module:

* As noted, all information gathering must be anonymous. No
information about the sending system should allow for someone viewing
the data to be able to identify the system in quesiton.

* The module must send all of its data encrypted.

* Users must be notified as the last message on startup that anonymous
usage statistics are being gathered.

* The module must provide the ability for users to opt out of
gathering statistics.

* Users must be able to go to asterisk.org and view the statistics
gathered for their server. The module must provide a unique,
non-identifying token that users can use to view the gathered
statistics for their servers.

After some careful thought, we've put together a proposal for such a
module – called “Beacon” - on the Asterisk wiki [1]. In addition to
meeting the requirements discussed at previous AstriDevCons, the
proposal on the wiki outlines a Swagger schema for a REST API that the
module will talk to. The module configuration will support sending the
usage statistics to more than just the server at asterisk.org,
effectively allowing anyone to send statistics from their servers to
other implementations of the REST API. This can be beneficial for
people deploying large numbers of Asterisk servers.

As mentioned, the asterisk.org site will be updated to allow for users
to view the collected statistics. A sample screenshot is attached to
this e-mail. Note that this is merely a mock up given some fake data,
but it should hopefully illustrate what this may look like for
Asterisk users.

Please take a look at the spec on the wiki and the proposed project,
and comment here with any suggestions for improvements.

Thanks!

Matt

[1] https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/AST/Asterisk+Beacon+Module

-- 
Matthew Jordan
Digium, Inc. | Director of Technology
445 Jan Davis Drive NW - Huntsville, AL 35806 - USA
Check us out at: http://digium.com & http://asterisk.org
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