Softphone Wireshark Capture

[Guest DanH]

This week the team has explored the technically profound subject of packet captures on softphone devices, and presented a guide on how to set that up with Wireshark. For those unfamiliar, Wireshark is an industry-leading general purpose packet capture system with wide ranging applications, and is particularly beloved in the VoIP world for its ability to help diagnose many call-related issues. It is a powerful platform with a bit of a learning curve, however, so one may want to familiarize themselves with this tool before attempting the below--if you're a Wireshark pro already, any tips or tricks you want to share here are very welcome!

Not all softphones have features in place for capturing packets. This method will walk you through capturing packet traffic for softphones such as Bria, Zoiper, etc.

Once Wireshark starts, select Capture, then Options. A new wireshark page will now populate for Capture Option.

 

Select Manage Interfaces. From here, you will see a page showing all the different networking devices (ethernet card, wireless card, etc.) that are available on your computer. Select the device you want to capture packets from and deselect the rest, then hit ok. This will take you back to the Capture Options page. As you can see below, I have chosen to display only my Ethernet connection.

 

Now press Start, and Wireshark will start capturing the incoming and outgoing packets from the device you chose above.

While Wireshark is running, run Bria and try to recreate the issue you are trying to resolve.

To save the resulting capture, click File > Save. Leave the file type as default and save the file.