How to observe your Asterisk instance with Grafana Cloud

Observability and monitoring are crucial for contact centers using Asterisk, a popular open-source IP PBX software, to ensure seamless customer interactions. Integrating Asterisk with Grafana Cloud enhances monitoring capabilities by utilizing the res_prometheus module, introduced in Asterisk version 17, which acts as an embedded Prometheus exporter. Users can start by creating a Grafana Cloud account and enabling the exporter within Asterisk, followed by installing the Asterisk integration and configuring the Grafana Agent to gather logs and metrics. The integration offers pre-built dashboards for an overview of Asterisk metrics and log details, along with pre-configured alerts such as system restarts, reloads, high scrape time, and active call counts, allowing for efficient system monitoring and management. This setup simplifies deploying and managing Asterisk instances, ensuring a robust monitoring framework that supports scalable communication infrastructures.