Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, 2nd Edition

Chapter 13. Managing Your Asterisk System

It won’t be covered in the book. The source code has to be useful for something, after all.

—Larry Wall

While there is a cornucopia of creative things that you are going to want to do with your spanking-new Asterisk system, there are also some basic, unglamorous, dare we say, boring things that need to be discussed.

Call Detail Recording

Without even being told, Asterisk assumes that you want to store CDR information.^[139]

By default, Asterisk will create a CSV file and place it in the folder /var/log/asterisk/cdr-csv/.^[140] To the naked eye, this file looks like a bit of a mess. If, however, you separate each line according to the commas, you will find that each line contains information about a particular call, and that the commas separate the following values:

accountcode

Assigned if configured for the channel in the channel configuration file (i.e., sip.conf). The account code is assigned on a per-channel basis. You can also change this value from the dialplan by setting CDR(accountcode).

src

Received Caller ID (string, 80 characters).

dst

Destination extension.

dcontext

Destination context.

clid

Caller ID with text (80 characters).

channel

Channel used (80 characters).

dstchannel

Destination channel, if appropriate (80 characters).

lastapp

Last application, if appropriate (80 characters).

lastdata

Last application data (arguments, 80 characters).

start

Start of call (date/time).

answer

Answer of call (date/time).

end

End of call (date/time).

duration

Total time ...