Expressway CDR

Cisco Expressway is able to generate its own CDR, it has some very interesting metadata about your Expressway calls, and long story short it’s possible to ingest these records into Splunk. 

This is something we are currently working on and it is only just becoming available. If you are reading this and you’re excited by the possibility of ingesting the CDR data from your Expressways… well, we are as well ! A number of customers have asked for this so here we go. 

First of all, please reach out to us to say hello (info@​sideviewapps.​com) , and please do send over any and all details around what visibility and insight(s) your team needs to get out out of this data source. This is very much an area of active development for us so if we need to, we’ll be able to make changes very quickly. 

First go to your Expressway to see if CDRs are already configured. Someone may have already set things up to send them out via syslog (and if so you should learn that now. Then go find them and bring them a nice present). 

1. Go to Maintenance > Logging
2. In the Logging Options section, if the Call Detail Records field is set to Off then CDR’s are not being generated.

Or, the other two values it might be set to, represent your options for generating them: 

1. Services and Logging in this configuration the CDRs are stored locally for 7 days and then deleted. The records are accessible from the local Event Log, and are also sent as INFO messages via syslog, if you are sending syslog out externally.
2. Service Only in this configuration the CDR’s are only stored locally for 7 days and then deleted. The records are not accessible through the web user interface and can only be read via the Expressway REST API. 

Getting the Sideview App

By the time you read this it may be up on Splunkbase already, but the Sideview app is called the ​“Supporting App for Expressway CDR”. 

As with our other ​“Supporting Apps”, it augments the main ​“Cisco CDR Reporting and Analytics” app. When installed alongside the main app, and after you have the Expressway data flowing in, you can click around in the app UI to investigate and generate charts and dashboards on your expressway traffic, in the same way that you do for your CallManager CDR and CUBE CDR.

To give you an example though, here is a screenshot showing an intraday calling pattern for a filtered search result of about 700 expressway calls.