[VoiceOps] SIP OPTIONS PING

[Jesse Howard]

This all depends on what you want from it. In my experience OPTIONS pings are useful for identifying possible issues that may or may not require investigation but not a good indicator of actual issues that require actual action to be taken without human intervention. Asterisk for example will take a peer out of service if it doesn't respond in the amount of time specified in the "qualify" setting. While this sounds like a good thing it requires knowing your peers and setting the "qualify" value appropriately or you may accidentally take a peer out of service with values set too low or may leave a peer in service too long with values too high.

As some have mentioned already some vendors do not even respond to OPTIONS, other times you are getting a response directly from a proxy which may not be indicative of the services behind it and many other times the service delivering media is not the same (or even on the same subnet) as the one delivering SIP messaging so you wouldn't want to drop calls in progress.

In the end you know your setup and (hopefully) your vendors. Use this for what will work for you. In general the more information you can gather the better but knowing when to take action or not to take action is more unique to your individual needs.

Jesse

-----Original Message-----
From: Frank Bulk [mailto:frnkblk at iname.com]
Sent: Monday, June 25, 2012 9:32 AM
To: voiceops at voiceops.org
Subject: [VoiceOps] SIP OPTIONS PING

Does anyone have some real-world experience with SIP OPTIONS PING?  Our softswitch vendor is looking to implement support and seeking some input on check frequency, response timeouts, how quickly to check recheck on a down, and how long to wait after it's up before restoring the SIP trunk group.
And should there be a ramp-up period through some kind of rate-limiting?

If you have a product that does it well, what parameters does it use?

How do you think the software should handle existing calls that may or may not have active media flows?  Should it tear down calls immediately, use some kind of active media detection, or wait x minutes before tearing down calls?

Any input here or offline would be appreciated.

Kind regards,

Frank



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