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Kamailio monitoring with statsd, SIPCapture or Packetbeat

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In the last Kamailio World two of the hot topics were Packetbeat and SIPCapture. Both projects announced good news meanwhile the conference, people got excited about it.

SIPCapture released a new version 5, huge work from Alex and Lorenzo. Both worked hard in this version. SIPCapture 5 provides the following new features:

SIPCapture review on VUC

Secondly Packetbeat announced that joined Elastic and started a new branch called Beats. Packetbeat provides an interface to monitor our application performance without pain. You can monitor all SQL information, Redis, HTTP information and get some insights of your application.

Packetbeat presentation on OSDC 2015

Finally, statsd module can be added in this list. This module provides some features to monitor your business logic. If you want to deep on this, please read the following posts:

So three monitoring tools. Can we use only one? What is the strengths and the weaknesses of these software? Is all valid for our platform? Yes, but these projects fit for different situations, let me explain:

SIPCapture is an awesome tool, but it only can help with our SIP stack, I love it and I use to work with it. You can check what happens in your calls, and it's pretty useful in the following cases:

Packetbeat is to monitor your application performance. Nowadays Kamailio is using a lot 3 party software (databases, Messages Queues, Cache system). Monitoring errors or timeouts of those 3-party software can be done with Packetbeat without pain.

Business/personal metrics must to be done in statsd. In statsd you can't define what happens in a specific call or specific query, you're measuring the percentile of the metric that you want it's correct, for example:

UPDATE: As Alex point me in Twitter, all the perf stats can be displayed in SIPCapture included Packetbeat metrics and Influxdb metrics sending by statsd. So SIPCapure it's perfect for support and operations. Awesome work made by Lorenzo & Alex.

Some developers changed statsd for Logstash. My personal opinion about that is the following:

Finally for telecoms companies all of the explained projects are useful. SIPCapture is the swiss-knife for support teams. Packetbeat is an amazing tool for all the operations teams and statsd is good for operations team and marketing/business team to make decisions based on the current metrics.

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