Now achieve multi-region availability and proactive call monitoring with Amazon Chime Voice Connector

In March 2019, AWS launched Amazon Chime Voice Connector, a pay-as-you go SIP trunking service for your on-premises phone system that can save you over 50% on your voice calling costs. The service is delivered over your Internet connection or AWS Direct Connect and can elastically scale up or down to meet your business needs. Voice Connector has no upfront fees or long-term commitments, which means you pay only for the voice minutes and phone numbers you use.

Today, we are excited to announce three new features for Voice Connector that improve our customer’s experience:

· Multi-region call routing – High-availability SIP trunk call routing with automatic fail-over between AWS regions.

· CloudWatch metrics, alarms, and logs – Operational insights into your voice calling service.

· Outbound Caller ID name – Display your name or company name on the Caller ID display of the party you are calling.

Multi-Region Call Routing
Voice calling is a mission critical workload for our customers. In order to ensure business continuity, enterprises build their on-premises voice networks with redundant network elements and multiple connections to the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Amazon Chime Voice Connector already supports redundant SIP trunks between a customer’s on-premises phone system and a single AWS region. Starting today you can now send and receive calls on your voice connectors across two AWS regions for additional redundancy and reliability. With this new feature, the service automatically routes calls to the region that provides the highest availability to and from the customer’s phone system. The service supports traditional on-premises phone systems like private branch exchanges (PBXs) and contact centers, as well as cloud phone systems with bring-your-own calling. Should a single region or connection encounter an availability event, the backup region will automatically take over call processing without impacting the customer.

To start using Voice Connector multi-region call routing, login to the AWS Management Console and click Chime. Then click Voice Connector and Create new voice connector. Select the AWS region (e.g. US East (N. Virginia)) from the drop down and then select Create. Repeat this process and create a Voice Connector in a different AWS region (e.g. US West (Oregon)).

Then click Voice Connector and Create new voice connector. Select the AWS region (e.g. US East (N. Virginia)) from the drop down and then select Create. Repeat this process and create a Voice Connector in a different AWS region (e.g. US West (Oregon)).

Next, click Voice Connector Group, enter a name, and then add the two previously provisioned Voice Connectors to the group, then click Create.

Finally, assign phone numbers to the Voice Connector group by clicking the Phone number tab, selecting the phone numbers you wish to assign and then click Assign from Inventory.

Voice Connector CloudWatch Metrics, Alarms, and Logs
When companies choose SIP trunking for PSTN calling they are confronted with a new set of challenges when trying to diagnose and pinpoint calling problems. Since voice calls traverse the numerous network elements in the company’s LAN/WAN and service provider network, determining the source of an issue is difficult and time-consuming.

Starting today, Amazon Chime Voice Connector now lets you monitor the health of your SIP trunking voice calling resources using Amazon CloudWatch, a service that provides metrics for call completion and on-premises phone system connectivity. You now have visibility into key voice calling metrics in the familiar operational health dashboards that you already use in AWS. In the past, you had to procure or build custom monitoring solutions. Now, you can monitor, troubleshoot, and set alarms for all your Voice Connector calling resources using Amazon CloudWatch. The service collects, aggregates, and summarizes Voice Connector metrics and logs.

The CloudWatch for Amazon Chime Voice Connector dashboards gives you access to the following real-time and historical information for the Voice Connector to on-premises phone system:

• Inbound calling metrics, including active calls, call attempts, answered calls, and call failures
• Outbound calling metrics, including active calls, call attempts, answered calls, and call failures
• Connectivity between your on-premises phone system and AWS
• Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) message contents

With CloudWatch for Voice Connector, you can:

• Identify the location (AWS, customer premises) of call completion issues
• Quickly identify and resolve SIP interoperability issues during initial service testing
• Create CloudWatch alarm notifications to track performance and potential issues
• Set thresholds on key metrics and trigger an action, such as posting to a Chime room or paging an on-call, enabling you to minimize downtime and potential business impact.

To start using CloudWatch for Voice Connector, login to the AWS Management Console and click CloudWatch. Then click Dashboards to see pre-configured dashboards for inbound calls, outbound calls, call failures, and metrics.

Outbound Caller ID Name
Outbound Caller ID Name (CNAM) is a traditional phone feature that displays your name or company name on the Caller ID display of the party you are calling. Starting today, we make it easy to set calling names for Amazon Chime Voice Connector phone numbers using the Amazon Chime console. Amazon will make the necessary changes to the Line Information Database (LIDB) so that your configured name will appear on outbound phone calls. There is no charge to use this feature.

Administrators can set a default calling name for all numbers in an organization or for individual DIDs.

To set Caller ID name, login to the AWS Management Console and select Amazon Chime. Then click Phone number management tab under Calling. To set a default calling name for your entire organization select Default Calling name and enter the name.

To set the calling name of individual phone numbers, click on the phone number and then click Calling name.

Where to go for more information
You can learn more about these three new features in the Voice Connector documentation: Multi-Region Routing, CloudWatch Integration, and Outbound Calling Name.

To start using Amazon Chime Voice Connector, login to Amazon Chime in the AWS Management Console.