[Asterisk-Users] Questions about alarm reporting in Asterisk

[Rich Adamson]

> 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!

There are lots of different ways to sense problems including those you've
mentioned. Others include:
- writing a small app that simply interrogates those interfaces that are
  important to the operation (iax2/udp, sip/udp, etc, send a crafted pkt
  and interpret the returned result. Port not open is obvious, no response
  is obvious, incorrect response is not so obvious)
- test call to an outside number once per five minutes, hourly, or whatever
  trips your trigger (outside number only needs to respond with something
  that is predictable, doesn't have to be a person or company)
- monitoring logs looking for keywords (may take some time to identify the
  appropriate keywords)

There are open source apps available that already address some of those, but
weren't written specifically for *.

Rich