Menu
Grafana Cloud

Asterisk integration for Grafana Cloud

Asterisk is a free and open source framework for building communications applications and is sponsored by Sangoma. Asterisk enables the creation of communication applications such as PBX (private branch exchange), VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), and conference servers. The Asterisk integration can monitor useful metrics and logs of an asterisk instance.

This integration includes 4 useful alerts and 2 pre-built dashboards to help monitor and visualize Asterisk metrics and logs.

Before you begin

In order for this integration to work, you must enable the embedded Prometheus exporter in Asterisk to collect and expose Asterisk metrics. The embedded Prometheus exporter also requires the embedded Asterisk HTTP server to be enabled.

When both the Asterisk HTTP server and Prometheus exporter are enabled - the metrics are exposed by default on the URL: http://localhost:8088/metrics

To enable logs collection, logging to file must be enabled in asterisk configuration.

Sample res_prometheus configuration /etc/asterisk/prometheus.conf

[general]
enabled = yes
core_metrics_enabled = yes
uri = metrics

Sample http_server configuration /etc/asterisk/http.conf

[general]
enabled=yes
enablestatic=yes
bindaddr=0.0.0.0
bindport=8088
prefix=
sessionlimit=100
session_inactivity=30000
session_keep_alive=15000

Sample file logging configuration in /etc/asterisk/logger.conf

[logfiles]
full => notice,warning,error,verbose,dtmf,fax

Once the configurations are updated, restart the Asterisk server with the following command: sudo systemctl restart asterisk Check the status of the Asterisk server: sudo systemctl status asterisk Then login to the Asterisk CLI to verify it’s running: sudo asterisk -r

The metrics should be exposed by the embedded Prometheus exporter on the URL http:/localhost:8088/metrics

Install Asterisk integration for Grafana Cloud

  1. In your Grafana Cloud stack, click Connections in the left-hand menu.
  2. Find Asterisk and click its tile to open the integration.
  3. Review the prerequisites in the Configuration Details tab and set up Grafana Agent to send Asterisk metrics and logs to your Grafana Cloud instance.
  4. Click Install to add this integration’s pre-built dashboards and alerts to your Grafana Cloud instance, and you can start monitoring your Asterisk setup.

Post-install configuration for the Asterisk integration

After enabling the metrics generation, instruct Grafana Agent to scrape your Asterisk nodes.

Asterisk exposes a /metrics endpoint. To scrape it, add the provided snippet to your agent configuration file.

The agent also must be configured to collect logs from the full Asterisk log file as shown in the snippet.

Make sure to change targets in the snippet according to your environment.

Configuration snippets for Grafana Agent

Below metrics.configs.scrape_configs, insert the following lines and change the URLs according to your environment:

yaml
    - job_name: integrations/asterisk-prom
      relabel_configs:
      - replacement: '<your-instance-name>'
        target_label: instance
      static_configs:
        - targets: ['localhost:8088']

Below logs.configs.scrape_configs, insert the following lines according to your environment.

yaml
    - job_name: integrations/asterisk-logs
      static_configs:
      - targets: ['localhost']
        labels:
          job: integrations/asterisk-logs
          instance: '<your-instance-name>'
          __path__: /var/log/asterisk/full

Full example configuration for Grafana Agent

Refer to the following Grafana Agent configuration for a complete example that contains all the snippets used for the Asterisk integration. This example also includes metrics that are sent to monitor your Grafana Agent instance.

yaml
integrations:
  prometheus_remote_write:
  - basic_auth:
      password: <your_prom_pass>
      username: <your_prom_user>
    url: <your_prom_url>
  agent:
    enabled: true
    relabel_configs:
    - action: replace
      source_labels:
      - agent_hostname
      target_label: instance
    - action: replace
      target_label: job
      replacement: "integrations/agent-check"
    metric_relabel_configs:
    - action: keep
      regex: (prometheus_target_sync_length_seconds_sum|prometheus_target_scrapes_.*|prometheus_target_interval.*|prometheus_sd_discovered_targets|agent_build.*|agent_wal_samples_appended_total|process_start_time_seconds)
      source_labels:
      - __name__
  # Add here any snippet that belongs to the `integrations` section.
  # For a correct indentation, paste snippets copied from Grafana Cloud at the beginning of the line.
logs:
  configs:
  - clients:
    - basic_auth:
        password: <your_loki_pass>
        username: <your_loki_user>
      url: <your_loki_url>
    name: integrations
    positions:
      filename: /tmp/positions.yaml
    scrape_configs:
      # Add here any snippet that belongs to the `logs.configs.scrape_configs` section.
      # For a correct indentation, paste snippets copied from Grafana Cloud at the beginning of the line.
    - job_name: integrations/asterisk-logs
      static_configs:
      - targets: ['localhost']
        labels:
          job: integrations/asterisk-logs
          instance: '<your-instance-name>'
          __path__: /var/log/asterisk/full
metrics:
  configs:
  - name: integrations
    remote_write:
    - basic_auth:
        password: <your_prom_pass>
        username: <your_prom_user>
      url: <your_prom_url>
    scrape_configs:
      # Add here any snippet that belongs to the `metrics.configs.scrape_configs` section.
      # For a correct indentation, paste snippets copied from Grafana Cloud at the beginning of the line.
    - job_name: integrations/asterisk-prom
      relabel_configs:
      - replacement: '<your-instance-name>'
        target_label: instance
      static_configs:
        - targets: ['localhost:8088']
  global:
    scrape_interval: 60s
  wal_directory: /tmp/grafana-agent-wal

Dashboards

The Asterisk integration installs the following dashboards in your Grafana Cloud instance to help monitor your system.

  • Asterisk - Logs
  • Asterisk - Overview

Overview

Overview

Logs Overview

Logs Overview

Channels Information

Channels Information

Alerts

The Asterisk integration includes the following useful alerts:

AlertDescription
AsteriskRestartedCritical: Asterisk instance restarted in the last minute.
AsteriskReloadedWarning: Asterisk instance reloaded in the last minute.
AsteriskHighScrapeTimeCritical: Asterisk instance core high scrape time.
AsteriskHighActiveCallsCountWarning: Asterisk high active call count.

Metrics

The most important metrics provided by the Asterisk integration, which are used on the pre-built dashboards and Prometheus alerts, are as follows:

  • asterisk_bridges_channels_count
  • asterisk_bridges_count
  • asterisk_calls_count
  • asterisk_calls_sum
  • asterisk_channels_count
  • asterisk_channels_duration_seconds
  • asterisk_channels_state
  • asterisk_core_last_reload_seconds
  • asterisk_core_properties
  • asterisk_core_scrape_time_ms
  • asterisk_core_uptime_seconds
  • asterisk_endpoints_channels_count
  • asterisk_endpoints_count

Changelog

md
# 0.0.5 - September 2023

* New Filter Metrics option for configuring the Grafana Agent, which saves on metrics cost by dropping any metric not used by this integration. Beware that anything custom built using metrics that are not on the snippet will stop working.
* New hostname relabel option, which applies the instance name you write on the text box to the Grafana Agent configuration snippets, making it easier and less error prone to configure this mandatory label.

# 0.0.4 - August 2023

* Add regex filter for logs datasource

# 0.0.3 - February 2023

* Add missing units to panel
* Rename alert summaries based on linting standards

# 0.0.2 - June 2022

* Update mixin to latest version:
  - Fix job variable regex

# 0.0.1 - March 2022

* Initial release

Cost

By connecting your Asterisk instance to Grafana Cloud, you might incur charges. To view information on the number of active series that your Grafana Cloud account uses for metrics included in each Cloud tier, see Active series and dpm usage and Cloud tier pricing.