Monitoring Asterisk PBX with Zenoss Core
A few days ago Matt Ray, Zenoss Community Manager, emailed me to let me know that they had posted a beta release of a new ZenPack created by Andrea Consadari for monitoring the Asterisk PBX system using Zenoss. Matt had orignally told me awhile ago that he was working with an Asterisk solution provider that was not only creating a ZenPack to monitor your Asterisk installation, but that they were even going to give you the ability to send alerts through a community-provided Asterisk server. Unfortunately whomever that Asterisk solution provider was appears to have dropped off the map. Andrea Consadari has stepped up to the plate now to at least provide the monitoring ZenPack, read to find out what it can do for you!
Today I decided to download the ZenPack, install it, and see how well it works. Normally I would of liked to have created this post as a step-by-step How-To guide on getting it up and running, however as the ZenPack is currenty in beta status I’m going to put off doing that for the time being as it does contain bugs. Nothing too major, but problematic enough that it will not work for you at all out of the box without editing a bunch of files.
The ZenPack right now is collecting the following data from your Asterisk server:
- Number of total SIP peers
- Number of online SIP peers
- Number of total IAX2 peers
- Number of online IAX2 peers
- Number of total SIP users
- Number of total IAX2 users
- Number of currently active SIP channels
- Number of currently active IAX2 channels
- Number of PSTN channels in use (I believe its actually ZAP/DAHDI channels in use)
- Number of total ZAP channels
- Number of Agents logged in
- Number of Agents not logged in
- Number of total “New” voicemails
- Number of threads currently active
- Number of seconds Asterisk has been online
That being said… that is the data the script at the heart of this ZenPack is collecting. It however does not mean that all of those values are currently actually being used by Zenoss. At present, nothing releated to IAX2, or ZAP/DAHDI is currently showing in the Zenoss interface. A few moments ago I sent off an inquiry to the developer of the ZenPack to find out if this is a bug or something that is not yet implemented but have not heard back yet.
This ZenPack uses an AMI connection to Asterisk to execute commands on the machine to retrieve this data, personally I would of been a little happier if it uses the res_snmp module for Asterisk, however there may be some limitations with doing that.
Well call this post a bit of a preview for now. Once some of the bugs with the ZenPack are resolved I’ll create a full How-To on the ZenPack to help you get up and running with it. Below is a sample screenshot of a portion of the output from the ZenPack.
October 7th, 2008 at 5:25 am
This is of significant interest to me - please don’t hesitate to post an update.
On a related note, I’d *love* to implement a monitor that tests and reports on call quality and call completion. Ideally, it’d be a part of a ZenPack that would place calls to and from the monitored PBX. Obviously paying for all of those monitoring calls could get expensive, but would be well worth it for many folks.
Graham
October 23rd, 2008 at 12:22 am
I am looking for some idea and stumble upon your posting
decide to wish you Thanks. Eugene