Stop SSH-ing Into Your Asterisk Box: Build a Real Observability Stack

For most of my career running Asterisk in production, "monitoring" meant SSH into the box, run asterisk -rx "core show channels" , squint at the output, and hope the number of active channels looked right. Maybe check /var/log/asterisk/full when something broke. Maybe not. That approach stopped being acceptable around the time we crossed 50,000 daily calls across a 4-server cluster. When a SIP trunk goes down at 2 PM on a Tuesday and 300 agents go idle, you need to know in seconds, not whenever someone notices the real-time report looks weird. This is how to build actual observability for Asterisk: metrics collection with OpenTelemetry, storage in Prometheus, visualization in Grafana, and distributed tracing for individual call flows. Why OpenTelemetry Over Custom Scripts You could skip OTel entirely. Install prometheus-node-exporter , write a bash script that scrapes asterisk -rx output into Prometheus-formatted metrics, and call it done. I've done exactly that. It works. It's also fr