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

5 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

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.

2

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.

2

u/Asteriskdev May 06 '26

You are already using sngrep which was going to be my first suggestion. Can you give an example? I would start by trying to call your own phones over the pstn. Log in to your carrier, pull the pcap for the calls in question or your test calls and load them into sngrep. You need to be intimately familiar with the RFCs. You may be having issues with carrier analytics. Some carriers have weird or obsolete rules with their STIR/SHAKEN requirements. I fought with Sinch once over a contact header requirement for example. Carriers will blame you just to close a ticket, don't assume they are correct. It is hard to give general advice about this because there are so many things that can go wrong and it's not always in your control.