Reporting and
Analytics

CDR collection and billing reports are a basic operational requirement for most organizations. However, collecting billing information and consolidating accurate call accounting reports have never been trivial endeavors, especially in a distributed, multi-vendor PBX environment.

Traditional call accounting systems, such as buffer box technologies that attach to the Station Message Detail Recording (SMDR) port on each PBX, have helped provide some limited call accounting capabilities across the enterprise. However, these single purpose solutions have many limitations and flaws:

•	They are time-consuming and costly-to -manage point products.
•	They depend on the PBX for information which is not rich or analytic beyond basic CDR.
•	They are “store and forward” rather than real time solutions, meaning the reporting occurs after the call has ended, which does not allow the user to take any action to stop an unauthorized or inappropriate call
•	The connection with the switching device/PBX can fail.
•	They provide incomplete and less accurate information as compared to inline reporting solutions because the PBX database can be outdated or have incorrect information.
•	The PBX cannot determine or report on the type of call (e.g., voice, fax, modem or video calls).
•	They rarely come bundled with other core voice network security and management applications, so they do nothing to prevent malicious or abusive calls—where the waste actually originates.
•	They often are not highly flexible or powerful in their reporting capabilities beyond basic billing.
•	Many do not elegantly scale across larger enterprise environments.

The SecureLogix ETM® System is PBX independent and unifies enterprise-wide CDR collection, billing, and resource utilization reporting across VoIP and TDM networks. The Usage Manager applications provides rich voice analytics to help reduce financial losses and spending, with reporting on all types of usage, utilization, security, policies, trending, and performance. It supports real-time policy enforcement and historical reporting so you can prevent malicious and fraudulent activity and not just report on the damages.