Asterisk 11: Call ID Logging

So... I wrote a blog post!  On another blog!

Asterisk 11 Development: Call IDs for Asterisk Logs

Pretty exciting stuff for administrators of Asterisk.  If you've ever watched an Asterisk CLI on a busy system, you know that at even low verbosity, the log statements for calls end up so intermingled that making sense of it all takes a lot of skill and patience.

Well, it'll still take that - just a lot less.  All channels now get a unique Call ID that lasts for the lifetime of a call - not just the channel.  When channels are bridged, their Call IDs are merged - if a channel is bridged with another channel and they both have Call IDs, one of them gets retired.  As channels move between calls, the Call IDs are tracked.  In the end, you can either get all the calls that a channel was involved in, or get all of the channels involved in a single call.

This lets you grep through Asterisk log files and get only the information you need - all the way down to DEBUG statements.

I'm hoping to get a blog post put together for the Digium Blog on chan_motif next.  And no, there is no protocol named "motif"... hence why we need the blog post :-)