Do you ever feel frustrated with how something works on your Metaswitch? Perhaps the process to provision a particular feature is annoyingly slow, or there’s a report that you need that’s hard to produce. In this article we’ll be looking at some common frustrations that could be resolved with an external software application written using the Metaswitch APIs.
In some cases, tools already exist to solve this problem, and in other cases it would be possible to create a tool if there was sufficient demand. So my goal in this article is two-fold:
- Build awareness of the kind of changes that are possible by using the APIs provided by Metaswitch, so you don’t feel so constrained by the precise features offered in the product today.
- Learn from you guys which features are particularly important, which could then lead us to develop some tools for the community.
So without further ado, here are 7 problems that could be solved using the Metaswitch APIs. Please let me know which of these are important to you, and which issues I’ve missed. This list comes from a mix of conversations I’ve had with clients and some popular enhancement ideas listed in the Metaswitch Communities forum.
1: Bulk import voicemail-to-email configuration for business group lines
If you build hosted PBX business groups regularly you’re likely familiar with the import spreadsheet tool that you can use within MetaView Web to import your business group, MLHG and business group line configuration. This import tool is fantastic and saves a ton of time, but unfortunately it doesn’t support one key feature – voicemail-to-email.
For me, one of the greatest time-savers as a hosted PBX user was the fact that all my voicemails were automatically forwarded to my email inbox, along with an approximate transcription of the message. The only problem: as things currently stand this must be manually configured through the user’s CommPortal interface – which means as a service provider you either have to manually do this for every line, or you push that responsibility onto the user. I know a lot of service providers end up doing the former, which is pretty tedious work.
The good news: it’s absolutely possible (and I have a friend who’s done this) to create a tool that automatically configures this through the Metaswitch API. So if this is a common frustration in your business let me know and I can connect you.
2: Clone a Multi-Line Hunt Group / Build it from a template
Have you ever gone through the trouble of configuring the first MLHG for a business, and then realized that they have 5 more that are basically the same with some minor tweaks?
Unfortunately, there’s currently no way to copy or clone a multi-line hunt group, so if you encounter this situation you simply have to build each of them one after the other – which again is pretty time consuming.
The good news is that there are a couple of different ways to solve this:
- If you use the existing MetaView Web import spreadsheet function you could pretty easily create multiple MLHGs with very similar configuration by copying and pasting extra lines in the spreadsheet.
- If you prefer to build the first one through the GUI, then it would be possible to create a tool using the APIs to pull all the configuration you built, tweak a few settings, and then re-import the data. Personally I’d be tempted to use the import spreadsheet function as this already exists, but I’m sure some people find it much easier to use the GUI to build the MLHG, and so cloning that first group would be a big help.
3: A tool to easily compare two different config sets (routing tables)
In an ideal world each time you modify your switch translations (Number Validation and Trunk Routing tables) you would build on top of what was already done, and you never move backwards.
However, I’ve occasionally found myself needing to merge more than one set of changes as we tried to prepare a big change while also dealing with some smaller day-to-day updates. And if you’ve ever tried this you know it can be a nightmare.
So what if there was a tool that allowed you to easily see the differences between two config sets on your switch?
The way we do this today is by exporting both config sets into a file, and the running some kind of diff tool over the files (diff is built in to Linux/Unix, and there are any number of windows applications that do the same thing). The problem with this approach is that it create a lot of false positives – places where a timestamp changed or an alarm was raised, but no actual configuration difference exists between the two versions.
But it wouldn’t be too hard to create a Metaswitch-specific diff tool that ignored these benign differences, and simply highlighted the important differences between the two versions. Let me know in the comments if this would be valuable to you.
4: Better email notification of logs and alarms
Currently you can configure your MetaView to send an email notification for all logs above a certain severity, but you don’t have much granular control.
However, you could build an application using the APIs and an SNMP trap receiver that filtered the logs received in a much more specific way – perhaps you could create a list of alarms to ignore, or you could request to be notified when previous alarms have cleared.
5: Do more with BG call logs
A business group administrator can access call logs for their BG, to see a list of all calls during a certain time period, with the idea that this data can be pulled into a spreadsheet and analyzed manually as desired by the user.
But if a particularly important customer has some specific desires, or if your customers in general have specific reports that could be generated from this data, you could create a script to pull off these logs, process them, and send reports to your clients on a daily, weekly or monthly basis as you see fit.
6: Search Configured SIP Bindings by IP address
If you have a large number of PBXs and SIP trunks on your system, and you’re investigating a problem based on a specific IP address, it can be really tedious to find the correct binding.
But it would be very possible to create a tool to connect to the Metaswitch APIs to search through the list based on an IP address you provided – saving a lot of time for large deployments.
7: View an easily-searchable list of changes to your system
Have you ever been troubleshooting a problem and noticed a setting that looked wrong? And you think to yourself, “I’m sure that used to be right… probably… did someone change it?”
Well I have good news for you. There are some text files buried on your MetaView server that record every change made through MetaView Explorer, and you can analyze these files to figure out what happened.
The bad news? They’re pretty tough to understand, and they don’t include changes made on other systems (such as Perimeta).
This sounds like a great way to make use of some APIs to solve the problem, and the great news is that it’s already been done. Search on the Metaswitch Communities website for a tool named Audit Cracker, which has a nice GUI that allows you to see an integrated view of change logs from multiple sources, and to search through these logs to see when a particular setting was changed.
Hopefully this has given you just a few ideas of the kinds of problems that can be solved by using the APIs. If you have the skills to create these tools yourself, that’s fantastic. If not, and the problems worth spending some money to fix, get in touch and we’ll see how we can help you.
- Build awareness of the kind of changes that are possible by using the APIs provided by Metaswitch, so you don’t feel so constrained by the precise features offered in the product today.
- Learn from you guys which features are particularly important, which could then lead us to develop some tools for the community.
So without further ado, here are 7 problems that could be solved using the Metaswitch APIs. Please let me know which of these are important to you, and which issues I’ve missed. This list comes from a mix of conversations I’ve had with clients and some popular enhancement ideas listed in the Metaswitch Communities forum.
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