As its primary function, CAR generates reports about the users of Unified Communications Manager and generates reports on the system status with respect to call processing. CAR also performs CAR database management activities. You can perform these tasks in one of the following ways:

• Automatically configure the required tasks to take place.

• Manually perform the tasks by using the web interface.

You access CAR from the Tools menu of Cisco Unified Serviceability after you activate the appropriate services as described in the Activate CAR.

All CAR reports use CDR data. CAR processes the CDRs from flat files that the CDR Repository service places in the CDR repository folder structure. CAR processes CDRs at a scheduled time and frequency. By default, CDR data loads continuously 24 hours per day and seven days per week; however, you can set the loading time, interval, and duration as needed. In addition, the default setting loads only CDR records. CMR records do not get loaded by default.

Note	An option allows you to uncheck the "Load CDR Only" check box in the CAR System Scheduler window to allow CMR records to load. See Set Up CDR Load Schedule for additional information.

CAR retrieves information that is required for various reports from CDRs, CMRs, and the Unified Communications Manager database.

Scheduling Reports

After CAR is activated on your system, you can schedule CAR reports to generate automatically at a regular time. Each report that can be scheduled has its own report generation interval. You can make the report generation interval be daily, weekly, or monthly. Scheduling Daily reports schedules all the reports that have report generation intervals of daily. Similarly, scheduling Weekly or Monthly reports would schedule the reports that have report generation intervals of weekly or monthly. You can also specify the time to keep a report before it gets automatically deleted.

By default, CAR uses the following report generation and deletion schedule:

• Daily reports run at 1 a.m. every day. These reports get purged after two days.

• Weekly reports run at 4 a.m. every Sunday. These reports get purged after four weeks.

• Monthly bill reports run at 3 a.m. on the first day of every month. These reports get purged after two months.

• Other monthly reports run at 2 a.m. on the first day of every month. These reports get purged after two months.

Note	If you upgrade your system to a new version of Unified Communications Manager, you must disable the CAR reports that generate automatically, so you conserve system resources during the upgrade process.

For a list of reports and the default generation schedule, see the Enable Automatic Generation Reports.

For system monitoring, automatically generate various reports, such as QoS reports, and review them at regular intervals, perhaps every day if you have a very large system, or every week or every two weeks for smaller systems. QoS reports help you determine the quality of calls that run on your network and judge whether you need additional hardware to improve performance. You can use utilization reports for gateways, voice messaging, conference bridge, route groups, route lists, and route patterns to provide a picture of the usage to help with system handling.

You can also customize the report parameters and enable a mailing option, so reports get emailed when they are created. The Customize Parameters option allows you to customize the report parameters for particular reports in the Customize Parameters window. For each individual report, you can customize the parameters for that report.

Setting Up Alerts

CAR provides email alerts for various events, including the following events:

• Charge Limit Notification indicates when the daily charge limit for a user exceeds the specified maximum. You can set the maximum in the Report Config > Notification Limits window.

• QoS Notification indicates when the percentage of good calls drops below a specified range or the percentage of poor calls exceeds a specified limit. You can set the range in the Report Config > Notification Limits window.

Enabling the system for email alerts comprises a two-step process. First, you must specify the mail server configuration information (System > System Parameters > Mail Parameters). CAR uses the configuration information to successfully connect to the email server. Next, you must enable the email alerts on the Automatic Report Generation/Alert window (Report Config > Automatic Generation/Alert). By default, CAR enables email alerts for some, but not all, reports.

Be sure to disable the automatic email alerts to conserve system resources while you upgrade your system to a later version of Unified Communications Manager.

Note	The system does not provide email alerts to application users because no mail ID exists for an application user.

Purging CAR Data

This section contains information on the following topics:

• Automatic purging

• Manual purging

• Event log purging

CAR provides automatic and manual purging of the CAR database. By default, the system enables automatic purging. Before and after loading CDRs/CMRs, CAR checks the size of the CAR database and invokes automatic purging, if necessary, to control the CAR database size.

With automatic purging, CAR continuously monitors the number of days that the CDRs are kept in the CAR database; when the CDR age exceeds the maximum number of days as configured in the maximum age setting in the Configure Automatic Database Purge window, CAR deletes all CDRs that are older than the number of days that you configured.

In the Configure Automatic Database Purge window, you specify the percentages of the CAR database that you want to allot for CAR data; the system maintains the CAR database size between the high water mark and low water mark that you specify. When the CAR database size exceeds the low water mark, CAR sends an email to CAR administrators. When the CAR database size exceeds the high water mark, CAR begins to delete the partitions from billing data and billing error tables, starting from the oldest date partitions until under the specified limit, allowing the system to continue loading the latest records. In cases where there are a large number of CDRs present in the CAR database and deleting the partitions does not lower the limit, CAR will keep at least two days worth of data and send an email to CAR administrators.

Configure manual database purge when you want to delete records that are older than a particular date or that fall in a specific date range, but you do not want to change the automatic purging schedule. You can also reload the CAR database with CDR records by clicking the Reload button in the Manual Purge window. You may want to reload the database to reclassify calls after dial-plan updates, user-device association changes, call rate changes, and so on. After the system loads the new records, the system loads the records according to the schedule in the configured CDR load schedule. By default, CDR data loads 24 hours per day, 7 days per week.

Event log purging, which is a daily scheduled job that monitors the tbl_event_log table, automatically deletes the tbl_event_ log records to keep the latest 3 days of daily jobs, the latest 3 weeks of weekly jobs, and the latest 3 months of monthly jobs; that is, if more than 1500 rows exist in the tbl_event_log table, CAR automatically enables event log purging and does not send an e-mail when event log purging occurs.

Call Costs

You can use CAR to set a base monetary rate for the cost of calls on the basis of a time increment. Then, you can further qualify the cost by applying the time-of-day and voice-quality factors. Service providers who must account for service to subscribers use this feature. Some organizations also use this information to establish billing costs for users and departments in the organization for accounting or budgeting purposes.

Reports that use these rating parameters include Individual Bill, Department Bill, Top N by Charge, Top N by Number, and Top N by Duration.

Note	If you do not change the default value for charge base/block, the cost will always remain zero because the default base charge per block equals zero.

Note	If you do not want to increase call cost by voice quality, you can use the default values. The default multiplication factor specifies 1.00, so no increase in call cost for voice quality occurs.

For more information on setting call rates, see CAR Rating Engine.

Tracking Activity

CAR provides logs that can track the status of the various activities. The event log tracks events that the CAR Scheduler triggers, such as automatically generated reports, loading of CDRs, notifications, report deletions, database purging and monitoring, and event tracking.

CAR provides reporting capabilities for three levels of users:

• Administrators use all the features of CDR Analysis and Reporting; for example, they can generate system reports to help with load balancing, system performance, and troubleshooting.

• Managers can generate reports for users, departments, and QoS to help with call monitoring for budgeting or security purposes and for determining the voice quality of the calls.

• Individual users can generate a billing report for calls.

Any user can act as a CAR administrator. Users who have been identified as CAR administrators have full control over the CAR system. The administrator can modify all the parameters that relate to the system and the reports.

CAR requires a minimum of one administrator.

You set up administrators, managers, and users in Cisco Unified CM Administration. For more information, see the Generate CAR Users.

With audit logging, any configuration change to the Unified Communications Manager system gets logged in separate log files for auditing. An audit event is any event that is required to be logged. Cisco Unified CDR Analysis and Reporting creates audit logs for these events:

• Scheduling the CDR Loader.

• Scheduling the daily, weekly, and monthly user reports, system reports, and device reports.

• Mail parameters configurations.

• Dial plan configurations.

• Gateway configurations.

• System preferences configurations.

• Autopurge configurations.

• Rating engine configurations for duration, time of day, and voice quality.

• QoS configurations.

• Automatic generation/alert of pregenerated reports configurations.

• Notification limits configurations.

Note

Refer to the "Configuring the Audit Log" chapter in the Cisco Unified Serviceability Administration Guide for information on how to configure the Audit Log. Refer to the "Working With Trace and Log Central" chapter in the Cisco Unified Real-Time Monitoring Tool Administration Guide for information on how to view the audit logs.

You can upload a text file that contains a customized log-on message that appears on the initial Cisco Unified Communications Manager CDR Analysis and Reporting window.

For more information and the procedure for uploading your customized log-on message, see the Administration Guide for Cisco Unified Communications Manager.

CAR, designed to be internationalized to handle any locale (or language), includes a database that can also handle any locale.

Note	CAR supports all Latin-1 language and Unicode language locales as Unified Communications Manager help specifies. Latin-1 languages include English and Western European languages. Unicode languages include Japanese and Chinese.

Two types of locale exists: user and network. Each locale comprises a set of locale files. The following definitions describe the two types of files:

• User - Files that relate to user-related functions, such as phone display text, user applications, and user web pages.

• Network - Files that relate to network-related functions, such as phone and gateway tones. Country names designate network locales.

CAR supports the locales only if the Locale Installer has installed locales.

Note

For Unified Communications Manager, make sure that you have first installed the Cisco Unified Communications Manager Locale Installer on every server in the cluster. Installing the Locale Installer ensures that you have the latest translated text available for CAR. For more information about the Cisco Unified Communications Manager Locale Installer, see the Administration Guide for Cisco Unified Communications Manager.

Only User and Manager windows support multiple locales. Administrator windows display in English.

In the Cisco Unified CM Administration, set the user-preferred locale in the Unified Communications Manager database. You do this when you create a user from the End User Configuration window. Specify the preferred locale along with the user name, user ID, and so on. The Unified Communications Manager database stores this information.

For more detailed information, see the Cisco Unified Communications Manager Online Help.

These sections describe the elements that make up the internationalization of CAR.

Logon Page

When the client (browser) requests the logon information, the logon window header includes the most preferred locale of the client. The CAR system checks whether the CAR UI supports this locale. If the CAR UI does not support the locale, or if the locale is not installed in the system, the logon window displays in the Unified Communications Manager system default locale that is set in the Cisco Communications Manager Enterprise parameter. If CAR does not also support this locale, or the locale is not installed in the system, the locale gets set to English_United_States.

Authenticate and Show CAR Pages for Post Logon Windows

User credentials (in any language) get authenticated through the Unified Communications Manager database, and then CAR windows for non-administrative users (users or managers) display the user preferred locale. If the CAR UI does not support this locale, or if the locale is not installed in the system, the Unified Communications Manager system default locale gets used. If this locale is not supported by CAR, or is not installed in the system, windows display in the most preferred locale of the browser. When the browser-preferred locale is also not supported or not installed, the locale gets set to English_United_States. All information on the UI windows, including labels, number formats, and so on., displays based on the locale. The administrator windows always display in English.

Reports

Reports, which are generated in both CSV and PDF formats, display in the user preferred locale for non-administrative users (users or managers). However, the dynamic data (like the Company Name shown in the report header) displays in the same language as was used to enter it in the database. The locale provides the basis for the header, footers, number formats, and some static data (like call classification). Reports for administrators display in English.

The CAR program supports the following web browsers:

• Microsoft Internet Explorer Release 7.0

From any user PC in your network, browse into a server where CDR Analysis and Reporting displays in Cisco Unified Serviceability and log in as a CAR administrator, manager, or user.

To access CAR documentation online help, choose Help > Contents and Index (for a list of contents) or Help > For this page (for information that is specific to the page that displays.)

When you upgrade from an earlier version of Unified Communications Manager to a later version of Unified Communications Manager, you may not be able to upgrade all your CDR data. For additional information about the limitations that affect the amount of CDR data that may be available after upgrade, see the CAR Database. You may also need to refer to the latest Data Migration Assistant User Guide.

The CAR and CDR Disaster Recovery Service (DRS) now integrates into the Unified Communications Manager DRS. The DRS includes the backup of the CAR database, pregenerated reports, and the CDR preserved flat files.

The CAR Web Service and CAR Scheduler automatically stop before the backup and restore process begin, and automatically restart after the backup and restore process is complete.

The table displays the features and components that the Disaster Recovery System can back up and restore. For each feature that you choose, the system backs up all its components automatically.

For more detailed information, see the Administration Guide for Cisco Unified Communications Manager.

Cisco has performed basic testing to measure CPU utilization when CDRs and/or CMRs are enabled. The CPU utilization testing was measured on subscribers and was not measured on the publishers. Your actual results can vary because of the CDR Loader settings and the CDR Management settings for external billing servers. Table 1 displays the results of these tests.

Note	Be aware that these tests were performed with Unified Communications Manager Release 8.0(1).

• Generate CDR Analysis and Reporting

• Activate CAR

• CAR System Scheduler

• Cisco Unified Serviceability Administration Guide

• Cisco Unified Real-Time Monitoring Tool Administration Guide

• Administration Guide for Cisco Unified Communications Manager

• Cisco Unified Communications Manager Online Help

• Cisco Unified Communications Manager Call Detail Records Administration Guide

• Data Migration Assistant User Guide