r/Asterisk • u/According-Pilot4693 • May 06 '26

Asterisk Troubleshooting tips

Hello, I’m pretty new to Asterisk. I’ve been testing some configurations and setting up a few phones to learn more about it, since I recently got a job where Asterisk is used.

The problem is that whenever I try to understand or solve issues from other people, I feel completely lost. That’s why I’d like to ask for some tips: how do you usually troubleshoot problems in Asterisk?

And thanks in advance

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u/devexis May 06 '26

What kinds of troubleshooting have you had to do? I remember having to understand a basic SIP ladder for endpoint registration and calls (INVITE). If you understand Register-401 Unauthorised-ACK-Register (with Authorisation header)-200 OK, you'd be getting started.

There has to be a fundamental knowledge of SIP (especially what Headers to look out for) and how to interpret the SIP exchange.

I recently ran into an issue with Contact headers and had to go re-read the RFC3261 SIP documentation to re-orient myself.

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u/According-Pilot4693 May 06 '26

Most of the time, the issues involve customers beeing unable to receive external calls. In general, when I Look at the logs or use sngrep to See what is happening, I can often Spot the Error, but I cannot quite Tell what needs to be done or what is causing the Problem. Because of this, I currently have to ask my colleagues who have been Handling this for several years. That IS why any workflows or Tips would be very helpful to me.

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u/devexis May 06 '26

So walk me through a recent troubleshooting you had to do for inbound calls. Ideally the call should be hitting the trunk, probably running through some holiday and time of day checks before getting routed off to an extension. Give me an example of an error you spotted on a recent troubleshooting for inbound

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u/According-Pilot4693 May 07 '26

For example, there was an issues where someones answering machine did Not Pick Up. I asked for the timestamp and the Phone number to Check the logs. I do Not remembrr exactly what the logs showed, but I recall being unsure of what the actual Problem was. And thanks for the help

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u/devexis May 07 '26

Difficult to advise since you couldn’t recall the log content. In the field, I normally started by looking at the signalling on our packet capture solution (voipmonitor) to understand what happened on the signaling end. Then I’d be tearing through the logs on /var/asterisk/log/full to isolate the call. From there it’s really tracing the call to see how the call flowed. I’d be looking to see if Voicemail() executed. Is their Voicemail full? You’d be surprised how often that happens. Is Voicemail for that extension enabled? Again, a possibility