[Vtigercrm-developers] Asterisk Good News

Wed Aug 27 16:12:12 GMT 2014

yes the overhead for AMI listen can be issue

 normally dealt with by giving the AMI user Origination and Read Call only 
rights, that cuts down on 99% of what you need to parse

 in larger deployments where even the overhead of incoming calls to other 
extensions is burdensome, AMI proxy where each user has a proxy user that 
only listens to AMI data relevant to there own channel(s) 

 I would think you would only pull SQL data when user in vtiger clicks on 
PBXmanager (the user version where they can see the call logs, not the one 
for admin to change settings), and display the data rather than pulling it 
all the time and creating your own tables, if remote access to SQL is the 
concern its easy to write a php XML API, thats how our windows based call 
notification works for vtiger so we did not have to open SQL to outside 
world, when call comes in we take incomming phone number send it to our 
API, the API does all the SQL queries, then returns XML of the results, we 
did this with php, all that would be required is for you guys to say hey 
put this php file on your asterisk server and modify the database name, 
user and secret to match

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 From: "Akshath T.A" <akshath.t at vtiger.com>
Sent: Wednesday, August 27, 2014 11:09 AM
To: vtiger at camden.net
Cc: vtigercrm-developers at lists.vtigercrm.com
Subject: Re: [Vtigercrm-developers] Asterisk Good News   
  VtigerAsteriskApp does not modify any configuration of Asterisk directly. 
We have recommended changes to be made in Asterisk configuration to get the 
AGI request back to the App. Please make sure to track the changes in case 
you need to revert back.  AGI vs AMI  AGI events are listened for incoming 
calls as AMI event parsing had to deal with bit-of overhead  (as we did in 
5.4.0 Asterisk Integration). To origniate outgoing call AMI action is used  
(borrowed from our earlier implementation).  Working with AGI events is 
lot-easier than processing AMI ourselves. The hard-work is taken care by 
the asteriskjava library.

 Polling Asterisk DB from CRM server was not a model considered as both the 
applications can be setup on different machines.  Also php script used for 
regular polling in short-intervals (specially during active call handling) 
demands server resources and impatcts CRM performance - we had encountered 
this in our earlier implementation.

 The approach of implementation we have taken may not be the only way to 
get the integration. We are hopeful to see more such coming from community 
and take away the learning from the same.

 regards,
 AKshath

   On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 7:39 PM, vtiger at camden.net <vtiger at camden.net> 
wrote:   yes I am aware of what it was saying... but 101 was most certainly 
a valid extension, at the same time this was going on we could send our own 
origination command to AMI for 101 to call out and it worked just fine, 
that error is not produced by asterisk at all, its not a valid asterisk 
error return, you are mis-interrupting some other error and reporting it 
back as a asterisk error 

 I think it was some error inside your java, at the time this was happening 
we only saw data stream on webapp.sh on the click to call attempts, we 
where also looking at data streams on your agi.sh saw nothing, the cli with 
agi and verbose 10 notifications enabled saw nothing, and we also looking 
at the AMI stream, nothing there as well, so we dont even think your 
connector was even talking to asterisk at all

 we fixed the issue last night, stopped the webapp.sh and agi.sh files and 
prevented them from start @ boot, rebooted, cleared settings in vtiger PBX 
manager or rather put in a bunch of junk, saved, rebooted, put settings 
back into PBX manager, rebooted then turned the .sh files back on, not sure 
what steps fixed but simple stop and start of .sh files and/or system 
reboots did not fix

 we still have issue on on test server where it seems vtiger  altered 
something in asterisk where all the extensions we had in vtiger no longer 
will ring though a call queue, we have no data on the event we where not 
actively monitoring data streams, and your asterisk connector has never 
written 1 log to its own log directory, everything was working Friday, and 
Monday we checked on it again and found that vtiger was stuck in endless 
loop of inbound notification and those extensions would no longer sent a 
sip invite though call queue, even after they where removed from vtiger and 
a reboot, and the asterisk connector was completely shut down, keep in mind 
these are test servers dedicated to getting vtiger to work, they are lamp + 
asterisk + freepbx + vtiger only we have not moved into phase of testing 
with other packages so the problems we are having can only be vtiger, this 
is what concerns us about closed source java+agi, beyond we can not see 
code to try to help you we now have situation where it seems your connector 
and AGI have altered asterisk, we dont know whats it doing.

 the whole reason we advocate for just use the AMI is its simple and works 
and your not really doing anything that requires the interactivity that AGI 
allows, AMI can be used to originate call as well as be monitored for 
inbound, this is how tapi drivers work that plug into on site CRMs like 
ACT, SAGE CRM, Lexis Nexus, ect, its also how sugar / sweet crm are 
handling it

 I think the tiring the call records to data in vtiger is a great idea, but 
why are you generating your own CDR log's via AGI, and this is where I 
think you guys are hung up on using AGI, but asterisk does have it own 
MySQL tables and CDR reccords, why not during the isntall of vtiger ask for 
the asterisk database name and credentials and query them for the info, and 
vtiger should not be forcing all calls to record, asterisk gives us ways to 
record and not record calls, if you want to link to recordings fine but 
again you should be looking to see if a call was recorded, beyond a 
performance issue and potential duplication of whats already being done in 
the Asterisk, this ventures into a legal issue, a lot of places all parties 
must be notified and consent to call recording, with vtiger it forces the 
recording

 the general rule of thumb here is if you need user input like your making 
a IVR and logging what was entered then you need AGI, if your just 
originating calls and monitoring for inbound use AMI, in either case SQL 
should be used to get call record data

 AGI has it problems that you are unnecessarily dealing with, they are 
common for AGI, what if my agi script finishes before the call ends, what 
if the call ends before my agi script finishes and a whole host of other 
issues that you simply dont need to deal with for what your trying to do   

----------------------------------------
 From: "Akshath T.A" <akshath.t at vtiger.com>
Sent: Wednesday, August 27, 2014 3:19 AM
To: vtiger at camden.net
Subject: Re: [Vtigercrm-developers] Asterisk Good News     
  Hi,

 From the logs, it clearly states that the extension - 101 was not found by 
your Asterisk server when AMI originate request sent from Vtiger 
Connector.

 In order to nail down the issue, can we have a online meeting today or 
tomorrow so that it would help us know what really is causing the problem. 

 I will be available from 9:00 AM to 8:00 PM IST at my office. Please tell 
us your convenient time within this so that I can send you meeting link.

 Thank you.

 regards,
 Akshath
   Vtiger

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