Making Switch Management Easier

It's interesting how every organization manages their voice infrastructure a bit differently. Almost becoming a part of the "telecom culture" in a large organization, it's not surprising that we each have our own way of handling the organizational responsibilities of maintaining large voice switches.

I would like to focus on the Asterisk platform for a minute. Obviously, those who manage branded vendor solutions from Cisco, Avaya, and Nortel, usually utilize the included tools provided by the company. For those of us who craft our own dialplans and applications using the Asterisk platform, things are a bit different. Whether we use lots of macros, integrated or third-party database solutions, or even custom-developed GUIs, the management of a large Asterisk system can vary significantly from one place to another.

As mentioned above, vendor tools are great, but if you're stuck with a bad one, then it's a long and hard road. I've had my own "experience" with some of the Nortel management tools, such as Business Element Manager. Management aids that are slow, cumbersome, and illogical can make a telecom manager's job a living nightmare. However, if you're able to "roll-your-own" solution, you can benefit from the tools you need, and not worry about those you don't.

So, the ultimate discussion question is this: what do 'you' do to manage your Asterisk or open-source softswitch? Especially for larger organizations, how do you handle the growing needs of the dialplan, contexts, and even endpoint configuration files?

Do you develop your own, modify an existing solution, or use something prepackaged?