Single Number Reach and Buried Treasure In Your CDR

A customer cracked open our app recently to investigate call flow around Single Number Reach (aka SNR). What they found, and what we found together when they reached out to us, is that the actual SNR/​cellphone numbers are hidden in a little-known field called ​“finalMobileCallingPartyNumber”.

And in the moment we dug this little treasure out of their CDR, we both had a quick sequence of realizations/​revelations… 

Here, it’s better to show than tell, so let me illustrate a bit. 

Say the deskphone configured with SNR has the extension ​“2345”, and the two of us were just looking in ​“Investigate Calls” at all the calls into 2345. Through Single-Number-Reach it’s supposed to simultaneously ring out to the cellphone as well. Well… we could see the particular call that the user said had not gone to their cell. However with only the default fields showing in the results, we had no proof either way of whether CallManager rang out to the cell at all. I went and clicked ​“Edit Fields” to peek at some other fields (there are several hundred), and I typed ​“PartyNumber” into the little filter bar, knowing as I did that Cisco has some ​“lesser known” party number fields, and that Sideview adds even more.

There were 17 different fields with ​“PartyNumber” in their name somewhere. Behold:

And right there I said ​“Oh… I wonder if it’s just in finalMobileCalledPartyNumber”. We clicked it to add it to the selected fields, clicked ​“apply” to re-run the search, and suddenly there were the cell numbers that SNR was indeed ringing out to. Buried treasure unearthed in just a few seconds, at least.… once you find the right fields.

Anyway, it turned out that SNR had been working properly. We could see the call ringing the cellphone, and it was the same cellphone that the end-user had said never rang with this call. In fact from the call duration plus Sideview’s ​“on_​hook_​party” field, we could see the owner of the cell phone had not only answered the call but they had then immediately ended it. We went from knowing nothing to… maybe knowing a little too much.

We couldn’t blame the user with the cell phone really, because it was obvious from the storm of calls at that time that some extraordinary event was happening in real time. Everyone seemed to be calling everyone at once. The sort of time you could get a call and accidentally hang up on it and completely not remember it two minutes later. By the way I love these moments where I’m looking at someone else’s call flow all laid out flat and although I know literally nothing about the actual semantics or what’s ​“going on” in the real world, just from the CDR you suddenly see that there is quite a lot of human emotion happening there.… What particular emotions I have no idea, but regardless, these are precisely the sort of time when you’d need to have a quick answer that features like Single Number Reach are indeed working (and this is why you have a PBX as rock-solid as CallManager there in the first place). 

So that’s just the first realization. The next one was technically mine I think. I had a creeping dread that a reasonably adept customer hadn’t been able to discover the existence of this field on their own. Working on this still — quite possibly when you use the ​“number” field it should match against these other fields as well. 

But then of course the third one is — ​“Well what the hell are all these other fields that I’ve also never heard of?” 

Let’s go through them!

• The ​“big 3” are selected by default so if you’ve used our product at all you’ll know them — callingPartyNumber, originalCalledPartyNumber and finalCalledPartyNumber. (the second and third are often the same, but can be different if there’s any kind of forwarding happening).
• finalMobileCalledPartyNumber - as we’ve discussed this one is critical to Single Number Reach and is likely useful elsewhere. 
• Its analogue finalMobileCallingPartyNumber — I’m sure it’s buried treasure to someone.
• initialCallingPartyNumber and initialCalledPartyNumber - These are fields that the Sideview app adds. For single leg calls they’re just aliases to the normal field but for calls with multiple call legs, these will be the corresponding party number field on the very first call leg that connected. These can be a good quick way of analyzing some ​“more unruly” call flow, where a DiD number gets a lot of inbound calls that you care about but ALSO gets chained into a lot of internal transfers that you dont want to count.
• terminatingCallingPartyNumber and terminatingCalledPartyNumber. These are the cousins to the initial* fields, but they are the corresponding party number fields on the call leg that was the very last to terminate.
• outpulsedCallingPartyNumber and outpulsedCalledPartyNumber. If this is interesting to you… please reach out. I’ve seen it come up but never seen it catch anyone’s hair on fire. Meaning yours could be the first.
• callingPartyNumberType, finalCalledPartyNumberType — if you’re in North America or the Caribbean these are NANPA fields. Generally your values will be things like ​“mobile”, ​“fixed_​line_​or_​mobile”, or ​“toll_​free”. It’s from a vast set of other NANPA fields including CLLI and LATA and other proper nouns you maybe haven’t thought about in a decade. But they are there.
• and lastly the partition fields which… are almost never interesting. Until that moment when they are. 

As always, this is just the beginning

Can we lean forward and tell stories with this data?

1. With the deskphone’s extension in the number field, add finalMobileCalledPartyNumber=* to your searchterms, and finalMobileCalledPartyNumber selected in ​“Edit Fields”. 
   » You’ll be able to see and export the complete history of all SNR calls and to which cell they went.
2. Add another searchterm of duration<2 on_hook_party=“recipient” 
   » you’ll get the history of every time they hung up on the call right away. 
3. From there click the ​“Chart” tab, change ​“split by (none)” to say ​“split by finalMobileCalledPartyNumber” set the timerange to ​“last 6 months” 
   » you have a beautiful and/​or terrifying chart laying out a full timeline of every time they actually hung up on a SNR call and which cell number they did it with.