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Enterprise Monitoring for Restcomm – An overview of the APIs and the tools

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We really hope that everybody enjoys working with Restcomm and taking advantage of the tools and APIs that the platform provides. We make our best to provide you with all the required material such as documentation, turorials and how-to posts at docs.restcomm.com for you to best work with Restcomm.

But when it comes to the production deployment, an enterprise monitoring solution is missing. Of course Restcomm mission is not to be a monitoring tool, but rest assure that Restcomm provides all the required tools and APIs to use and integrate with well established monitoring solutions and project.

This post is the first one from a series of posts that will walk you through the integration of Restcomm with monitoring tools but not only that, we’ll show you how to best use the Restcomm APIs for integration with enterprise tools and provide sophisticated solutions for managing and monitoring the Restcomm platform.

In this first post I will give and overview for the Restcomm APIs and the tools we will use for monitoring and the integration to enterprise tools.

The requirements for enterprise monitoring

Lets define first what a monitoring solution for Restcomm should be. Such a solution should provide the following features and measurments:

  • Alerts and notifacations for errors and exceptions
  • Measurments for CPU and Memory, server resources in general
  • Measurments for traffic
    • Metrics for Calls and DIDs
    • Metrics for recordings
    • Metrics for incoming/outgoing SMS
    • Metrics for Restcomm clients

Such a monitoring solution will allow us to:

  • Get alerts and notification when something bad happens in the platform
  • Clearly see the voice and sms traffic peaks and busy hours (traffic engineering)
  • Detect suspicious traffic patterns – Prevent fraud
  • Discover bootlenecks and proactively ensure platform is running with the proper resources (cpu, memory, load balancers etc)
  • Discover and improve usage patterns and user experience

The Restcomm APIs

The Restcomm APIs can provide most of the metrics we will need.

  • Calls API will provide information about live and completed calls, will also give details such as date/time of the call, call duration, call completion, call direction (inbound/outbound) and called DID
  • Recording API will bring information about recorded messages or recorded calls and details about them such as date/time of the recording and duration
  • SMS API will present information about the inbound or outgoing SMS messages and details where can i buy diazepam online in the uk like date/time and called DID
  • Clients API will give information about Restcomm clients usage

The Restcomm APIs are a set of RESTful APIs which means you don’t need any special clients or protocols to access them. On top, the Restcomm APIs response will be a JSON response which makes our life easier with so many tools to work with JSON.

The tools

There are a lot of great tools out there for gathering and analyzing data. While I don’t want to point to any specific tools and distinguish them from the others, the posts here will be based on the most simple and powerful tools according to my personal judgement and the monitoring requirements we have here.

So in later posts, you will see how to integrate Restcomm with:

User contribution

Your role as a user is really important over here. We’d love to get your feadback, ideas and contributions with tools, scripts, tutorials etc.

For example, we’d love to hear from you about new features you would like to see at the Restcomm APIs to make monitoring more efficient and effective, get contributions with tools and scripts to help with the monitoring tasks or provide tutorials and instructions for how to use monitoring tools.

You don’t need to be a SIP or Java expert to become a perfect contributor. There are many tasks that someone could help with, and for them SIP or Java is not a requirement. And trust me, you will also love to be a contributor, see here if you don’t believe me http://bit.ly/dd1Vcs 🙂

What’s next?

In the next post I plan to show you how to use logstash, elasticsearch and kibana for how to collect, analyze and present data from Restcomm and logs.

Here is teaser of what we will see in the next post, a screenshoot from a Kibana dashboard with metrics from Restcomm.

Restcomm_Kibana_Dashboard

Stay tuned form more and make sure you subscribe to Telestax newsletter and follow us on Twitter so you miss nothing.

– George