Understanding the Integrated Convergence Services Accounting Feature

This topic covers the Integrated Convergence Services accounting feature, which enables you to collect data about calls, including successful calls (those that the called party answered) and failed calls (those that the called party did not answer).

You can use the accounting feature for calls made when the SRX Series media gateway (SRX Series MGW) is in control or when the SRX Series survivable call server (SRX Series SCS) is in control. When you configure the accounting feature, the voice daemon generates and collects call records.

It is possible that a call engaged in a constellation can both succeed and fail. For example, a call from one party to another might succeed, but if the call is transferred to a third party whose line is busy or the call cannot be connected for some other reason, it fails. In this case, two records are generated, one for the part of the call that succeeded and one for the part of the call that failed.

The voice daemon generates and collects accounting data about calls made and received between Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), Foreign Exchange Station (FXS), and Foreign Exchange Office (FXO) stations in the following pairs:

The voice daemon collects call records and writes them to a file in system memory when either a record batch size is reached or at a purge time interval, whichever occurs first. When the daemon writes the records to the file, it uses a comma to separate them; this method is referred to as a comma-separated format.

Note: The voice daemon compiles accounting records in batches; it does not provide real-time reporting.

You can specify the batch file size and the purge time interval. The batch file size and the purge time interval cooperate to ensure that call record data is not lost if the voice daemon crashes.

Note: Despite these precautions, the voice daemon can crash before either the batch size or the purge time interval is reached, in which case the generated and collected call records are lost. They are not written to a file in system memory.

You can direct the voice daemon to use a compact record format when it writes the records to the file, in which case records do not include optional information.

To protect against loss of data that can occur if the device is rebooted, at 15- minute intervals, the voice daemon writes the files either to a server, if one is specified, or to flash memory to archive them. If a server is configured, it takes precedence over flash memory. If flash memory (which is limited) is used and is full, the voice daemon overwrites the call record files stored in it based on a first-in, -first-out (FIFO) algorithm.

Note: If the system crashes before the file containing the call records is written either to flash memory or to an FTP server to be archived, the records that the voice daemon generated and collected are lost.

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