Cisco silent monitoring

Owned by Kiss, Mate
May 24, 2022

In Cisco Unified Communications Manager environments, the Verba Recording System has a special silent monitoring module, which allows to provide silent monitoring functionality without call recording. This allows organizations to implement silent monitoring in a very cost effective way. This special silent monitoring service is based on the RTP forking technology, introduced in CUCM 6.0.

The Verba Cisco Central Silent Monitoring Service is connected to the CUCM via JTAPI, and monitors all phones, which have to be silently monitored. The system automatically stores every call for the monitored phones until the calls are not ended (calls are available in the ongoing call list). Users with full privileges can list ongoing calls on the web interface and can start the silent monitoring. The main difference between the built-in recording service based silent monitoring and this method is that this method requires a Cisco IP phone, which is used to receive the forked RTP packets from the monitored phones. When a supervisor initiates silent monitoring for a call, the supervisor has to enter a directory number, where the system sends the silent monitoring session.

Supported Cisco environment

Supported Cisco Unified Communications Manager versions: 6.x, 7.x, 8.x

Supported Cisco IP phones (certain phones are only supported on the latest CUCM versions):

  • Cisco 6911
  • Cisco 6921
  • Cisco 6941
  • Cisco 6961
  • Cisco 7906
  • Cisco 7910
  • Cisco 7911
  • Cisco 7921
  • Cisco 7925
  • Cisco 7931
  • Cisco 7937
  • Cisco 7941
  • Cisco 7941G-GE
  • Cisco 7942
  • Cisco 7945
  • Cisco 7961
  • Cisco 7961G-GE
  • Cisco 7962
  • Cisco 7965
  • Cisco 7970
  • Cisco 7971
  • Cisco 7975
  • Cisco 8961
  • Cisco 9951
  • Cisco 9971
  • Cisco ATA 186
  • Cisco IP Communicator
  • Cisco VGC Phone

For a more detailed listing, see Cisco phones with central call recording support.

To find out, which phones are supported on your CUCM version, use the built-in reporting tool:

Step 1 Login to Cisco Unified Reporting on CUCM admin screen.

Step 2 From System Reports select Unified CM Phone Feature List.

Step 3 Select Feature: Record. This will list all phones capable to do RTP forking.