CDR Accounting Overview

This document describes the format and configuration of the call detail records (CDRs) generated by Cisco IOS voice gateways. You can use this information for postprocessing activities such as generating billing records and network analysis. This document describes how to access the CDR files, how to interpret fields in the files, and how to filter the CDR output to meet your specific needs.

Accounting is the method for collecting information used for billing, auditing, and reporting, such as user identities, start and stop times, number of packets, and number of bytes. Accounting enables you to track the services users are accessing, as well as the amount of network resources they are consuming.

Each accounting record contains accounting attribute-value (AV) pairs. Accounting packets for voice calls consist of standard and voice-specific attributes. This document focuses only on voice-specific attributes.

Cisco IOS voice gateways can generate CDRs using three different accounting methods. Table 1-1 compares the different accounting methods available for generating CDRs on Cisco IOS voice gateways.

 

Table 1-1 Accounting Methods Comparison

Accounting Method
Benefits
Restrictions

File Accounting
  • FTP and SFTP servers are inexpensive and easy to setup
  • Commonly available applications like Microsoft Excel can be used to parse and generate reports
  • Supports all CDR fields
  • Compact CDR format option
  • No support for real-time applications

RADIUS
  • RADIUS is an AAA server, you get AAA services along with the CDR collection
  • Supports real-time applications
  • Supports all CDR fields
  • Retries built-in
  • RADIUS servers are generally more expensive than other methods

syslog
  • Less expensive than RADIUS
  • One syslog server can support both error monitoring and CDRs
  • No support for real-time applications
  • Limited attributes supported
  • No retries built-in (UDP based)
  • If many debugs are enabled, server performance might be impacted