Reading and Understanding CUCM CDR files

CDR files – an overview

Cisco’s Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) is build to allow third party applications to provide call reports. This means that Call Manager will provide raw call logs, called CDRs (Call Detail Records) to whatever destination the engineer specifies. In fact, you can have up to three report destinations defined in Call Manager, allowing for multiple call reporting servers. Once you specify the address of your call reporting server inside of CUCM, it will begin pushing CDR files to that server. I believe it’s also important to mention that you can use the CDR Analysis and Reporting (CAR) to extract CDR files from CUCM. This will allow you to either manually review the CDR, or to manually feed it to a reporting / analyzing program.

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