Now that you've built Asterisk around your entire life it might be a good idea to make sure it stays up!

Argus

The current version of Argus has builtin support for monitoring SIP and IAX2, as well as support for querying the asterisk manager interface. Argus can be configured to notify someone if a PRI goes down, or if asterisk goes off to la-la-land (etc).

• Example Argus Config

Note: This doesn't appear to be supported in argus-3.3

Cacti

Cacti is a general purpose monitoring application, one user has developed an Asterisk plugin. More information on this plugin can be found here.

Update 2007

We at ITConnection.ru are happy to post a Cacti script for Asterisk IP-PBX statistics. It's based on Python, works over Asterisk manager API connection and provides cute and comprehensive graphs. You can download Cacti's plug-in from this page: http://forums.cacti.net/viewtopic.php?p=111317

Hobbit

Hobbit is a Big Brother compatible network monitor.

MRTG

• A script and instructions on how to setup MRTG for graphing asterisk activity can be find here

Munin

• Scripts for graphing Asterisk activity with Munin can be found here

Nagios

Notes documenting a simple Asterisk monitoring implementation utilizing Nagios:

• Nagios check_sip plugin

• Another Nagios plugin to test Asterisk via SIP using sipsak can be found here.

• Official Nagios Plugins http://nagios.org/download/ have a plugin called contrib/check_asterisk.pl This does remote IAX2 checking as well as remote checking through the manager interface.

• Plugin for monitoring Asterisk with Nagios, download the perl script and change the username, password, and server IP for the manager interface. http://megaglobal.net/docs/asterisk/html/asteriskmonitor.html

• Yet another plugin to allow monitoring of concurrent calls for different protocols, or testing for IAX responsiveness can be found Here

• A Nagios plugin which check the status of zaptel spans: Asterisk Zaptel Nagios plugin

• Dev Nagios IAX2 plugin. Checks from remote, not the Manager Interface. Uses IAX2 POKE. Other options are there just commented out. This works but could be improved. http://odunix.org/pbx/

• A nagios plugin wich checks weather zaptel spans are active or Deactivated http://edd.za.net/checkspans.php

• A nagios plugin compatible with NRPE (the script run on the Asterisk server). Display status of SIP account, Zaptel span... Official page en french - Sourceforge

PacketIsland PacketSmart

Packet Island's PacketSmart http://www.packetisland.com provides an asterisk software agent, a VoIP sniffer micro-appliance and a web hosted management service that allows for detailed SIP, RTP, and call route performance monitoring for Asterisk VoIP calls. MSPs can do remote monitoring and analysis of asterisk client sites using this product.

SNMP

The Asterisk team has added SNMP support to Asterisk 1.4.

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Other ideas

The manager interface sends events when a channel/span goes into alarm.
A simple app collecting this data should be easy to write

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.

3. 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)

4. 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)

5. Monitoring logs looking for keywords (may take some time to identify the appropriate keywords) (e.g. Swatch or Logwatch)

It would seem logical for someone to write a res_snmp.c for asterisk that would expose a lot of asterisk's internal data. This would seem a logical step toward writing fully functional monitoring applications as well. The module would allow clients to add themselves to the list and receive traps, as well as check for the current status of various variables.




_Idea is ours and now need to write code....... please include code here ....... Nahid Hossain_




James Thompson: I'd suggest using something like Sipsak to actually do a SIP registration to verify the service is up.
You could use the Whats Up Gold send/expect to connect to Linux box, run sipsak, and then check the results.

<brainstorming>
Okay, this may be over the top, but here goes. Write an asterisk application that sends (and receives) status information to another box over the PSTN. My idea is not only to use this as a way to verify that * is running, but asa way to RELIABLY tell that a remote * box is actively accepting incoming calls. It wouldn't have to be anything complicated, just a heartbeat and some basic details to let the caller know that "yes, I'm alive and acceptingcalls over this line". Simplified protocol:

1) Monitoring box calls up and says (in DTMF):
#<my CallerID>
#<extension I am trying to reach>
#<I'm a machine, so reply in DTMF instead of voice>
#<the secret code is>#

2) The remote box says:
#<your CallerID>#<Your DNIS>
#<yes I will accept a call to thatnumber>#

3) Monitoring box acknowledges and disconnects

4) Remote box disconnects

5) Monitoring box decides whether it likes the answers it received and performs actions accordingly.
</brainstorming>
Hint: Do a "show application AlarmReceiver" and you are very close to what you brainstormed... I think...


TJH- (nicheware)
I've had some problems with peers losing their registrations, usually due to crappy ISP's with DNS problems.
This script tests if peers are up. (registered) I call it from a cron job. If a peer loses it's registration I receive an e-mail.

#!/bin/bash
for peername in peer_1 peer_2 peer_n
do
# note, next lines are "command substitution" - use backticks ` not quotations ' as appropriate
otpt=`/usr/sbin/asterisk -rx 'iax2 show peers' |grep $peername |grep Unspecified`
if [ -n "$otpt" ]; then
echo $otpt | mail -s "Asterisk peer: \"`echo -n $peername `\" has a problem." "you@yourdomain.com"
fi
done

Next I want to grab peers previous IP addresses and include those along with the message that gets sent when they go
down. Sometimes if their asterisk is just hosed they will still have the same IP- so I can ssh in and fix it. Also it would be

nice to send either an electronic page or even a call file to alert me of problems - although I don't want the phone ringing
at 4AM.

-TJH

HAL

grep has problems with not printable chars, so you should use "strings -a" in your script.
otpt=`/usr/sbin/asterisk -rx 'iax2 show peers' |strings -a| grep $peername |grep Unspecified`

HAL

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Another note from a user on a large scale (S McGowan, 2005)

We're using Zabbix to run local UserParameter commands to monitor Asterisk. We use asterisk -rx commands to output what we want and then return the result to the Zabbix monitoring server. There's been small problems with too many remote connections at once crashing asterisk (anyone get that close to fixed?), and some problems with returning values because of grep, awk, sed, and/or wc not returning valid numeric values, but overall the idea is solid.

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See also:

• Astricon Europe presentation about asterisk stability and security
• Asterisk administration
• ast-ax-snmpd an old and now obsolete SNMP module for Asterisk
• Network Monitoring

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• Asterisk | FAQ | Tips & Tricks