[Asterisk-Users] Questions about alarm reporting in Asterisk

[Clif Jones]

I am currently helping a friend build an Asterisk PBX that spans
several cities using anything from T1s to DSL connections to
link remote SIP phones, IAX gateways, etc. to a central Asterisk
PBX server that serves up voicemail, features, etc.  The biggest problem
that I have had with this system appears to be the leading problem that
my day job company finds with their VOIP deployments:  Most common
problems are on the infrastructure network but are reported as "phone system
problems" because that is the piece that the customer directly interacts 
with.
I'm interested in hearing success stories in tying things like Asterisk 
YELLOW
and RED alarms and network problems into a central alarm reporting solution.

The most common problems that I have found are:
1. Someone unplugs a X100P from the Dmarc and nobody knows until people
    complain that calls are not coming in.
2. A network span goes down and nobody knows until they can't send or 
receive
    calls on that span.

Here are some ideas that I have thought about so far:
1. Installing a basic SNMP agent on each Linux box and using a central SNMP
    manager to monitor each node.  This would give notice when a remote 
node became
    isolated from the monitoring network.
2. Rolling in Asterisk alarm logs into a syslog server or even as SNMP 
traps.

Any good ideas would be appreciated!