The Asterisk Manager Interface (AMI) is a system monitoring and management interface provided by Asterisk. It allows live monitoring of events that occur in the system, as well enabling you to request that Asterisk perform some action. The actions that are available are wide-ranging and include things such as returning status information and originating new calls. Many interesting applications have been developed on top of Asterisk that take advantage of the AMI as their primary interface to Asterisk.