Cisco Call Detail Records (CDR) have a lot of data, very overwhelming if you ask me, and I have over 12 years of Call Analytics experience. A CDR is a comma delimited file that can easily be opened in a spreadsheet, but you’ll quickly realize how much data there is and how difficult it can be interpreting the call data this way. Depending on the CUCM version you’re running there are around 130 different fields or columns!
Here are 5 things you need to know:
1. Date and Time are listed in Unix Time Format or Epoch as commonly known. Simply put, it’s not easy to read without first doing some calculations. Epoch Time is the number of seconds that have elapsed since January 1, 1970 (midnight UTC/GMT) and of course not counting leap seconds… Who wants to calculate that… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
2. There is NO ring time! If you need to find out how long a call rang before it was answered you’ll need to do more calculations. Look for the “dateTimeOrigination” and “dateTimeConnect” fields, once you find them simply subtract and you’ll have the ring time in seconds.
3. If you’re looking to find out what internal resource answered a call start by tracking down the “finalCalledPartyNumber”, “destDeviceName” and in some cases “finalCalledPartyUnicodeLoginUserID” fields. Note, important pieces of information to better identify a user like First Name, Last Name, Managers,Departments or other Organizational Units are missing from CDR. Device Pool, Device Type, Device Description and Locations are other valuable pieces of information that you may need…. but sadly these are also missing from CDR.
4.Most worksheets have a maximum row limit of around 1 Million. This means that if your CUCM services more than 150 devices and each device makes around 20 calls per day and you need to report against all the calls in a one year time period a worksheet won’t be able to display all the information.
5.The most important thing to know is that Variphy deploys in as little as 15 minutes. Have complete control of your CDR!