My company develops, installs and supports a CAB (Call Accounting and Billing) application, which recently passed IVT certification at Cisco UK, so we can handle all the complex Cisco call scenarios.
However, a few of our larger clients have particularly large and complex enterprise configurations, usually involving a central CM with PSTN (POTS) trunks out of a gateway, as well as multiple remote nodes using SRST with CCME routers, with their own local PSTN trunks at the remote nodes. Some of the remote nodes allow break-out across the network using the head office PSTN trunks, while others do not.
Getting the CDR data is not a problem (we have solutions for both CM 4.x using SQL and CM 5.x using FTP). However, obviously accurate costing of PSTN calls requires us to identify which gateway in which location the PSTN calls connect to the PSTN carrier.
We need to be able to uniquely identify and label each distinct Gateway FXO / Telco FXS line, as well as ideally to "bunch" them into per-gateway groups, for costing against gateway-specific and carrier-specific costing tables within our application.
Our current strategy for doing this, involves using the contents of the "destDeviceName" field, but this is proving problematic as the contents of that field vary so widely (e.g. "SEP000B5F925F4B", "S0/SU0/ snipped-for-privacy@pstn-remote-gw.psdtemea.cisco.com", etc). The values in this field are also significantly wider than our application's "PSTN Trunk ID" field, which is currently limited to 20.
Does anybody have any suggestions as to what approach we should take, or what CDR fields we should use, to achieve our aim?
Regards, Andre Pekelaar
(andrep AT unirnd DOT co DOT za)