Monitor active calls on specific phone with SXML

[traviscogdill]

Our enterprise recently switched to cisco unified ip phones. Our IT helpdesk manager wants a real-time report of which of his helpdesk personnel are on an active call.

Our hope was that this would be possible through SXML.

We have created an SXML client and explored several of the services, but do not see anything relevant to whether or not a phone is on a call.

Is it possible to get this information from SXML? Is there some other solution we should look into?

[dstaudt]

SXML can provide the registration status of a device, but does not include any call-related information.  For real-time monitoring of individual devices/lines, please see the TAPI and JTAPI call-control interfaces - these can be used to register for real-time call events, hook status, etc.

https://developer.cisco.com/site/collaboration/call-control/jtapi/overview/

https://developer.cisco.com/site/collaboration/call-control/tapi/overview/

[traviscogdill]

Thank you for the reply dstaudt ...

I've seen that we can enable connection to the phone directly via http. We looked over the web page presented from that connection, and you can see some status information from there.

Are there any web services hosted on the phone itself over that http connection? Or is it possible to connect to perfmon on the phone and monitor some counters that way?

Thanks for any information you can share... I appreciate the recommendation of the TAPI/JTAPI interfaces but we have no C++ or Java programmers here. It looks like that would be a bit of a learning curve for our simple question: "is the phone on a call or not".

[dstaudt]

I've seen applications use the phone's web pages and status as you describe, with reasonably good results.  There are no formalized web services on the phone, though for some of the pages there is an XML version that can be retrieved, e.g. /DeviceInformation vs. /DeviceInformationX.

Some downsides include the 'poll' vs. event-driven model, variation in support/format of these web pages per phone model, and general 'screen scrape' type interaction...CTI is the 'bullet proof' solution for positively monitoring phones on a real-time basis.