Capturing network traffic for troubleshooting

There are certain situations when a recording problem can only be resolved if the Verba Technologies support team can take a closer look at the actual network traffic seen by the recorder.

For passive recorders it is an obvious action, but it can also be very useful for other recording methods to analyze the communication among the system components. This topic describes the officially supported ways to capture network traffic in Verba system.

Built-in packet capture tool: verbacapture

The Verba Recording System comes with a built in packet capture tool called Verba Capture. This tool collects and stores network traffic without analyzing it or interfering with the recording progress. Recording failure situations can be efficiently solved by the Verba support and development team, using the results of this tool, since raw traffic analysis allows our team to recreate failures in our a environment. Verba Capture creates standard PCAP files that can be opened by Ethereal or WireShark.

You can get command line help by running the tool without parameters:

The following example captures traffic from interface 3 into traffic.pcap

You can finish packet capturing by pressing CTRL+C.

Using verbacapture to document a fault

1. Open a windows command line: Start menu / Type 'cmd'
2. Command: cd "C:\Program Files (x86)\Verba\bin"
3. Command: verbacapture -i
4. Identify the number of the port where you would like to capture (1,2,etc.)
5. Command: verbacapture -c 3 traffic.pcap
   (in this example 3 was the 3rd port, and traffic.pcap is the name of the file where you want to store the traffic)
6. Let the tool run, make the necessary phone calls where you find a recording problem
7. Stop the tool by pressing CTRL-C

When you are submitting the resulting PCAP file, make sure you are also providing involved phone numbers and IP address information of the phones, the PBX and the gateways involved in your test calls, so our team can understand the data quickly.