I need to build a reliable predictive dialer based on Asterisk. Currently the system we use includes Wombat and Asterisk, and we do not find this solution usable as Wombat provides a poor API and it's impossible to use it without regular manual operations.
The system we want:
Can be used solely via API or direct database queries (adding lists to campaigns, updating lists, starting campaigns, stopping campaigns etc.) so that it can be completely integrated into an existing product
Is free, or paid for annually independent to the usage rate
Is considered stable
Should be able to handle tens of thousands of calls per day, if it matters
Use vicidial.org or hire freelancer to build new core with your needed api.
You can also check OSdial for this, it also developed using asterisk.
We have been working with a preview of the next version of Wombat, through the Early Access program, and Wombat has a complete configuration and reporting JSON API and you can deploy it "headless" in order to scale up to thousands of parallel lines. If you ask Loway they can likely get you access to the Early Access program.
BTW, Vicidial is great for agent-based outbound, but imposes quite a large penalty on the number of agents per server - you cannot reasonably use it to do telecasting at the scale we are looking for as it would require too many servers. Wombat is leaner and can drive over one thousands channel per server. YMMV.
This question would be better placed on a "hire-a-freelancer" site like oDesk ... if you need custom programing done, those are the sorts of places to go to get manpower.
Your specifications are well within what is possible with Asterisk. I'd strongly recommend looking at Vici Dial and OS Dial as others have suggested; out of the can, they are pretty good.
The hard part of any auto-dialer is not the dialer, oddly enough. It's the prediction algorithms, the answering machine detection algorithms and the agent UI. Those are what makes or breaks an auto-dialer application for a company.
Related
I am assessing a big-data project, we would need to pull lots of big data sets from various internet sources (ftp, api, etc), do light transformations and light data quality / sanity checking (eg: row and columnar inspections), and push it downstream. Immediate focus is batchy, but anticipate supporting streaming down the line. Ease of support at scale is an important requirement.
We are looking at Apache Nifi and Gobblin, which seem to overlap in intention. What sort of use cases fit which platform best? How would they conform to the use case above?
Thanks!
My experience is with NiFi, and I've just had a look at Gobblin, but mainly, NiFi is an application in itself, where Gobblin is a framework.
In NiFi, you'll have a GUI, with very granular authorizations, that allow, several users to intervene on different part of the flow, monitor it, etc ...
One other thing is that NiFi is 'always on' and 'always in production' you are potentially able to make your modifications directly on the target, and as such, there are a few safeguards in order to avoid losing data (by mistake, I mean).
So, where I think both solutions can do more or less the same thing, if you have a workflow where you want to deploy once from time to time, Gobblin might be a better fit, but if you want something where you give some users permissions to intervene on parts of the flow directly in production, NiFi will be the best.
In the end, to keep the question oriented on programming:
NiFi allows to you program graphically, to give very granular permissions to your 'developers', and well as to update the 'program' (the NiFi flow) while it is running
Gobblin seems (from what little I've looked up) to work by defining jobs with text files, which seems to be more of a 'classical' development workflow, but that may fit better for your usage.
Does UFT 12.02 supports ISO8583 & NDC protocol testing? If yes, can you advice the basic steps to configure the same in UFT.
The short answer is No.
They list Financial Services as one of the supported environments, but my experience that it is not financial transaction testing.
The longer version is while you can technically configure UFT to send these messages (if straight text) by capturing examples and sending them back through. Though when I was given a chance to use it as a trial and did this, it did not do it very effectively and had very high overhead compared other tools for financial transactional testing on the market than UFT. Especially for dynamic creation of data, packed vs. unpacked, BER TLV, encryption keys, or manipulation of data elements, and things that regularly change it is not very effective.
I would consider the following options, each of these vendor's have specific solutions for each interface and have many pre-built ISO-8583 modules you can license or you can create them on your own.
Paragon's FasTest
ACI ASSET
FIS's Clear-2-Pay (formerly Lexcel)
Paragon also has a product called ATMeMulator and ConfigBuilder for NCR & Diebold I have seen no equivalent product (or at least anything in the ballpark of features/functionality) out there for building and testing loads, screens, states, transactions, faults, etc.
Our company has people in every catastrophic event here in the U.S. and parts of Canada. An example is they were quite prevalent in Katrina immediately after the event.
We are constructing an application to improve their job in the field which may be either ASP.NET or WPF, and the disconnect requirement makes us believe it will be a WPF application. Our people need to be able to create their jobs, provide all of the insurance and measurement data, and save it as if in the database whether or not the internet is available.
The issue we are trying to get our heads around is that when at catastrophic events our people need to be able to use our new application even when the internet is not available. (They were offline for 3 days in Katrina)
Has anyone else had to address requirements like this and suggestions on how they approached functioning on small-footprint devices while saving data as if they were still connected to the backend services and database? We also have to incorporate security into this as well, and do it well enough that their entered data loads into the connected database without issues.
Our longterm goal is to also provide this application for Android and IPad Tablet devices as well as laptops. Our initial desire for ASP.NET was it gave us an immediate application for the tablet environment. In the old application they have, they run a local server, run remote connections on the tablets and run the application through terminal server. Not pretty. Not pretty.
I feel this is a serious question that is not subjective so hopefully this won't get deleted.
Our current architecture on the server side is Entity Framework with a repository pattern, WCF services to satisfy CRUD requests returning composite data transfer objects, and a proxy for use by the clients.
I'm interested in hearing other developers' input and this design puzzle.
Additional Information Added to the Discussion
Lots of good information provided!!! I'll have to look at Microsoft Sync for sure. For the disconnected database I would be placing only list tables (enumerations) in the initial database. Jobs and, if needed, an item we call dry books, will be added for each client we are helping. (though I hope the internet returns by the time we are cleaning and drying out the homes) These are the tables that would then populate back to the host once we have a stable link. In the case of Katrina we also lost internet connectivity in our offices which meant the office provided no communication relief for days as well.
Last night I realized that our client proxy is the key to everything working! The client remains unaware of the fact that it is online or offline and leaves the synchronization process within that library. We are discovering how much data we are talking about today. I also want to make it clear that ASP.NET was a like-to-have but a thick client (actually WPF with XAML) may end up being our end state.
Now -- for multiple updates. The disconnected work will be going to individual homes by a single franchise. In fact our home office dispatches specific franchises to specific events. So we have a reduced likelihood (if any) of the problem of multiple people updating a record. The reason is that they are creating records for each job (person's home/office/business) and only that one franchise will deal with it. Of course this also means that if they are disconnected for days that the device that creates the job (record of who, where, condition, insurance company, etc) is also the only device that knows of the job. But that can be lived with. In fact we may be able to have a facility to sync the franchise devices on a hub.
I'm looking forward to hearing additional stories of how you've implemented your disconnected environment.
Thanks!!!
Looking at new technology from Microsoft
I was directed to look at a video from TechEd 2012 and thought I might have an answer. The talk was on using ASP.NET and MVC4 along with 2 libraries for disconnected behavior. At first I thought it would be great but then as it continued it worried me quite a bit.
First the use of a javascript backend to support disconnected I/O does not generate confidence. As a compiler guy (and one who wrote two interpretive languages) I really do not like having a critical business model reliant upon interpretive javascript. And script at that! It may be me but it just makes me shudder.
Then they show their "great"(???) programming model having your ViewModel exist as just javascript. I do not care for an application (asp.net and javascript) that can be, and may as well be (for lack of intellisense ) written in notepad.
No offense meant to any asp lovers, but a well written C# program that has been syntactically and type checked gives me stronger confidence in software than something written with a hope and prayer that a class namespace has been properly typed without any means of cross check. I've seen too many hours of debugging looking for a bug that ended up in a huge namespace with transposed ie in it's name. I ran my thought past the other senior developers in my group and we are all in consensus on this technology.
But we continue to look. (I feel this is becoming more of a diary than a question) :)
Looks like a perfect example for Microsoft Sync Framework
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sync/bb736753.aspx
A comprehensive synchronization platform that enables collaboration
and offline access for applications, services, and devices with
support for any data type, any data store, any transfer protocol, and
any network topology.
I often find that building a lightweight framework to fit my specific needs is more beneficial to me than using an existing one. However, always look at what's available and weigh the pros and cons before making that decision.
I haven't use the Microsoft Sync Framework, but it sounds like that's a good one to research first. If you have Sql Server Standard (or some other version other than the Express version) then replication might also be an option.
If you want to develop your own homegrown solution, then be sure to put lastupdated and dateadded fields on any tables that need to stay in sync. It doesn't 'sound' like your scenario will be burdened by concurrency issues (i.e. if person A and B both modify a field at the same time, who wins?). If that's the case then developing your own lightweight solution will be pretty straightforward.
As Jeremy pointed out, you will need a way to get the changes. In addition to using a web service, you can also use WCF which is similar to a web service in some ways. But my personal bias would be towards just accessing a SQL server remotely over the internet. The downside of that solution is added security concerns, while the upside is decreased development overhead (i.e. faster/easier development now and less maintenance over time). Also, the direct SQL solution is also assuming that this is an internal application... that you're in charge of all development and not working with 3rd parties who need access to your data and wouldn't be allowed to access it this way.
Not really a full answer but too much for a comment.
I have two apps one that synchs one way and the other two way.
I do a one way synch to client for disconnected operation. At the server full SQL Server and at the client Compact Edition. TimeStamp is a prefect for finding any rows that needs to be synched. I also don't copy the whole database as some of the largest table are non nonessential. The common use is the user marks identified records they want to synch.
If synch does what you need great +1 for Jakub. For me I don't have the option to synch the whole MSSQL both based on size and security.
Have another smaller application that synchs two way but in this case it has regions and update are only within the region. So a region only synchs their data and in disconnected mode they can only add new records. Update to an existing records must be performed in connected mode. That was mangeable. In that case MSSQL for the master and used XML for the client.
No news to you but the hard part of a raw synch is that two parties may have added or revised the same record.
I'm working on a forum based website, the site also supports onsite messaging (ie. the users can send private messages to other users), what I'm trying to do is notify a member if they have new messages, for example by displaying the inbox link in bold and also the number of messgages, e.g. Inbox(3)
I'm a little confused how this can be implemented for a website running on a server farm, querying the database with every request seems like an overkill to me, so this is out of question, probably a shared cache should be used for this, I tend to think this a common feature for many sites including many of the large ones (running on server farms), I wonder how they implement this, any ideas are appreciated.
SO caches the questions, however every postback requeries your reputation. This can be seen by writing a couple of good answers quickly, then refreshing the front page.
The questions will only change every minute or so, but you can watch your rep go up each time.
Waleed, I recommend you read the articles on high scalability. They have specific case studies on the architectures of various mega scale web applications. (See the side bar on the right side of the main page.)
The general consensus these days is that RDBMs usage in this type of application is a bottle neck. It is also probably safe to say that most of the highly scalable web applications sacrifice consistency to achieve availability.
This series should be informative of various views on the topic. A word on scalability is highly cited.
In all this, keep in mind that these folks are dealing with Flickr, Amazon, Tweeter scale issues and architectures. The solutions are somewhat radical departures from the (previously accepted) norms and unless your forum application is the next Big Thing, you may wish to first test out the conventional approach to determine if it can handle the load or not.
In Joel's article for Inc. entitled How Hard Could It Be?: The Unproven Path, he wrote:
...it turns out that Jeff and his
programmers were so good that they
built a site that could serve 80,000
visitors a day (roughly 755,000 page
views)
How would I go about figuring out the maximum load my server(s) can handle?
Benchmarking your software is often a lot harder than it seems. Sure, it's easy to produce some numbers that say something about the performance of your software, but unless it was calculated using a very accurate representation of the actual usage patterns of your end users, it might be completely different from the actual results you will get in the wild. Websites are notoriously hard to benchmark correctly. Sure, you can run a script that measures the time it takes to generate a page but it will be a very different number from what you will see under real world usage.
Inorder to create a solid benchmark of what your servers can handle, you first need to figure out what the usage patterns of your users is. If your site is already running, you can easily collect this data from your logs. Next, you need to create a simulation that will emulate exactly the same patterns as your real users exhibit... that is - view front page, login, view status page and so forth. Different pages will create a different load on the servers requiring that you actually fetch correct set of pages when simulating load on your servers. Finally, you need to figure out which resources are cached by your users, you can do this again by looking through your access log or using a tool such as firebug.
JMeter, ab, or httperf
You can create several "stress tests" and run them as the other posters are telling.
Apache has a tool called JMeter where you can create these tests and run them several times.
http://jmeter.apache.org/
Greetings.
Jason, Have you looked at the Load Test built in to Visual Studio 2008 Team System? Check out this video to see a demo.
Edit: Here's another video that has better resolution.
Apache has a tool called ab that you can use to benchmark a server. It can simulate loads requests and concurrency situations for you.
Basically you need to mimic the behavior of a user and keep ramping up the number of users being mimiced until the server response is no longer acceptable.
There are a variety of tools that can do this but essentially you want to record a few sessions activity on your site and then play those sessions back (adding some randomisation to reflect real user behaviour) lots of times.
You will want to log the performance of each session and keep increasing the load until the the performance becomes unacceptable.