I try to write as much documentation for FreePBX and A2Billing as possible but sometimes it’s difficult to come up with ideas for what to write next.

If you have any requests, especially if you think the documentation might help lots of people, please write them in the comments below.

I can’t promise to write them, but please share any ideas.

Thanks, Matt

I’ve been publishing my blog for a couple of years now and thought it would be interesting to share some of the statistics that have been collected about it. My blog in mainly guides and tips for using Asterisk/FreePBX/A2Billing and also some general VOIP stuff.

Sometimes I think a blog is not the best platform for documentation. It’s a bit unstructured but I like having the date articles were published as documentation soon goes out of date.

So here are some of the figures collected by Google Analytics over the past year. I’m not sure there’s any really reliable stats systems, but Google Analytics relies on the client running Javascript so it’s probably as good as it gets.

In the past 12 months there have been around 121,000 visits, with just over 75,000 from unique IP addresses. Pretty good I think for a small blog about VOIP! The traffic is growing month on month. The busiest days are weekdays, with a slight drop off at the weekends.

There are a good proportion of visitors that return to the site. with over 46,000 IP visitors returning. Some of the how-to’s are quite long and I’m sure people have to keep re-reading to figure out exactly what I meant!

A huge proportion of the traffic comes form Google, with other search engines way down the list. This shows just how dominant Google are in the field of search.

And I guess not surprisingly most of my viewers are not using Internet Explorer. With Firefox top and Google Chrome second in the choice of browsers. However, Google Chrome has become more popular just looking at later months, rather than back over the previous year.

So my plan is to keep writing more (hopefully!) interesting posts and we’ll see what the visitor numbers look like in another year!

Humbug Labs is an online service that can monitor your Asterisk CDR records and generate e-mail/SMS alerts based on predefined traffic patterns.

There are quite a few different types of alerts and you should spend a few minutes selecting the alerts that are relevant to your PBX system. Statistics are available free with Humbug Labs, and fraud alerts are available for a small monthly charge, based on your monthly call volume.

Hourly Threshold

If a fraudster does figure out a way to place unauthorised calls through your phone system there’s a good chance they will place as many calls as they can, as quickly as possible. This can be a problem with VOIP as you may not have a limited number of ‘channels’ as you do with traditional phone systems.

Humbug Labs includes an alert that will send an e-mail/SMS if your system is used to place more than a predefined number of calls in an hour. It can also monitor the duration of all the calls placed in an hour.

Humbug Labs in an online service that monitors your PBX call records and produces statistics and alerts based on those records. The statistics part is similar to Google Analytics, except for phone systems. It produces graphs and charts based on calls flowing through your PBX.

On Asterisk systems a small client is installed that securely transmits the CDR records to Humbug Lab’s servers. You can monitor multiple PBX’s from a single Humbug Labs account.

For the statistics side you just install the client and it starts monitoring automatically. There is also an alerting component that can generate e-mail or SMS alerts based on call traffic matching a certain pattern.

This takes a few minutes to set up but it well worth it as it will provide an alert should unauthorised calls be placed using your system.

The following few posts are going to describe some of the alerts available.

BLACKLIST NUMBERS

There are 2 alerts available for blacklist numbers. The first will generate an alert if calls are placed to premium numbers. The second is a ‘Community Blacklist’ and these are telephone numbers that have been collected by Humbug Labs from telecom security organizations, law enforcement agencies, and Humbug’s fraud data repository that are known to be used by fraudsters.

There are no extra configurable options for these alerts. Just switch them on your CDRs will be monitored for calls to these numbers.