Call Detail Records: The CDR API Area

A call detail record is the smallest honest unit of telephony data: one row per call, produced by the network that carried it. Everything a call report tells you — volumes, durations, answered rates — is CDRs aggregated. Our API exposes those records directly, so your systems can read them without a human exporting spreadsheets. This page covers what CDRs are, how the API area works, and what businesses actually do with the data.

What a CDR is, precisely

When a call completes on your service, the network records the event: which of your numbers was dialed, when the call started, how long it ran, and the outcome data that reporting is built from. The record is factual and per-call — no sampling, no aggregation, no interpretation. That atomicity is what makes CDRs valuable downstream: any view you can define, you can compute.

How the CDR API area works

The CDR area is one of three areas in our API, alongside Services (listing your numbers) and Routing Management (controlling forwarding and recording). The whole API is RESTful JSON over HTTPS with bearer-token authentication, and it is rate limited like any production interface — callable from PHP, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Go and anything else that speaks HTTP. Freshness is the headline: records appear within about one to two minutes of a call completing, near enough for monitoring dashboards and far more than enough for daily reconciliation. The endpoint-level detail is on the API page.

What businesses do with CDR data

Three uses cover most of the field:

1. Reconciliation. Match billed call charges against the calls actually recorded — per-second billing makes the arithmetic checkable, and the CDR feed is the check.
2. Attribution. Join call records to campaigns, CRM entries or orders: which numbers rang, what those calls became. The analytics patterns are sketched in call analytics through the API.
3. Audit and record-keeping. A factual per-call history of who contacted the business and when — the kind of record retention policies ask for.

Getting started

The data flows from the numbers you host: standard 1300 and 1800 numbers from $10 a month, tracking numbers from $5 a month, all searchable on available numbers. Once a service is live, the CDR area returns its records; the reporting view for people rather than programs is in 1300 and 1800 number reporting.