I've spent much of the last two days working on an auditing and reporting mechanisms to let people know when we're getting close to PRI exhaustion. Following the advice of the back-end wizards, who don't see the necessity of having the tools, (the security/financial problems being lost on them) I've been cobbling together a CDR-analysis mechanism that gives a daily report of abusers and warns about situations where the PRI usage has risen above a given threshold.

But that's all batch-mode stuff, running up to 24 hours too late. Worse, the data-set the backend people suggested doesn't actually work the way they said it does... or maybe that's for the best, as it made me actually look at the setup and realise that the PSTN gateway is just as Asterisk server...

Yes, yes, I know, you're all way ahead of me at this point; "isn't he writing an AMI protocol for Twisted, and wouldn't that be a natural choice for monitoring an Asterisk server?" you're asking your significant other, who shushes you, preferring to let the blog play out without all the needless side-speculation.

Well yes, in fact the AMI would be a natural choice for monitoring the number of active channels and the number of active channels per user. It's the most obvious little task you could imagine... which is, I guess, why I missed it for so long (I'm really not good at obvious).

The reporting and non-real-time auditing stuff is still useful for making long-term decisions (luckily), but it seems there really should be a real-time monitor in place too.