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Configuring Verba for passive recording

Configuring Verba for passive recording

Feb 14, 2025

Prerequisites

  • Plan where you want to tap your network. For a good recording, both signaling and RTP traffic related to the recorded phones/trunks must be seen on the monitoring port.
  • Configure your network mirror ports.

Refer to the following links for more information:

Activate the Passive Recorder Service

  1. Log in to the web interface with System administrator rights.
  2. Under System, go to Servers, and select the corresponding server from the list.
  3. Go to the Service Activation tab.
  4. Activate the following services using the Activate this service button:
    Verba Passive Recorder Service
     (Activate this service)

Configure the Passive Recorder

  1. On your selected server, go to the Change Configuration Settings tab.
  2. Under either System > Internal domain, tenants and number pattern or Passive Recorder/Basics/Internal domain, numbers pattern, set the internal numbers/domain patterns to determine call direction (outgoing/incoming/internal) information
  3. Under Passive Recorder Configuration > Basic Settings > Recording interface, select the interface connected to the monitoring port.
  4. Under Passive Recorder Configuration > Advanced Settings > Record video call as audio, select video call recording mode.
  5. (Optional) Under Passive Recorder Configuration > Advanced Settings > Record incomplete calls, enable the logging of incomplete (for example, canceled call, called party busy) calls.
  6. (Optional) Follow Configuring DTMF control and recording to configure passive recording for DTMF calls.
  7. Select Save in the upper right corner of the configuration tree.
  8. Follow the instruction in the yellow banner above the configuration tree to apply changes to Verba services.
  9. Start the Verba Passive Recorder Service in the Service Control tab.
    If the services start correctly, you can start making test calls from your configured endpoints and verify them by searching for phone calls.

Configuration parameter reference

Basic settings

  • Recording interface: NIC on which the recorder is listening to network traffic.
  • Audio format: Storage format for audio-only calls.
  • Bidirectional/Stereo recording: If the storage format allows, the caller's audio will be recorded on the left channel, while the recipient's audio will be recorded on the right channel in a stereo media file.
  • Automatic Gain Control: Enables AGC on voice streams.
  • Conference Resources IP addresses: IP addresses of conference resources, used for recognizing conference calls.
  • Experimental H.323 support: Enables recording of H.323 calls. Module is still under development.
  • SIP support enabled: Enables recording of SIP calls.
  • Call timeout: Calls that stop receiving RTP packets will be terminated after this duration following the receipt of the last RTP packet.

Advanced settings

  • Capture buffer size: packet capture buffer size in megabytes.
  • Database cache folder: database cache file folder.
  • RTP address translation enabled: recording calls at SBC/RTP proxy usually needs to translate local/private addresses reported by phones behind NAT to the addresses seen in the IP header rewritten by NAT (public address). You can enable a special mechanism that tries to fix RTP address issues here.
  • PCM mixer buffer length: length of mixing buffer in milliseconds. Greater value provides better quality but higher memory load and bursty CPU usage.
  • RTP stream reorder buffer length: length of RTP reorder buffer can be controlled here. Greater value provides better reordering but increases memory usage.
  • Record video call as audio call: if enabled, only the audio parts of video calls are recorded; otherwise, video calls are recorded in Verba Media Format.
  • Media format fallback: in case of unsupported codecs, too many streams, not supported streams, transcoding quality issue, the recorder can intelligently change storage format to different kind of codecs, which might preserve the recording in more optimal quality.
  • Filter duplicated recordings by caller-called: only one call with the same participants will be recorded. This can avoid call duplication in the case of SBC/RTP proxy recording related to inbound and outbound legs.
  • Skip calls without media: Do not insert CDR at calls where no RTP has been received/processed.
  • SIP URI modification: control how to transform SIP URI.
  • Record incomplete calls: If enabled, CDRs for calls that were not established—such as those resulting from call cancellations or busy/not available responses—will be recorded with the appropriate end cause information.