

We go into detail about Wireshark and how to use it in our free guide to troubleshooting VoIP issues using Wireshark. The use of a laptop is advantageous because you may need to monitor your network at various locations, so being mobile enough to move from data room to data room is important. Its installation is quick and simple, and its operation is quite intuitive. Wireshark can be downloaded and installed on any Windows or Mac computer for free. Finally, a configuration of the network equipment so that packets can be sent to the monitoring computer for capture and storage.Next, you need an entry point onto the network that will allow you to connect the laptop to capture the packets.In most cases, this would be a laptop running Wireshark. First, a monitoring computer running packet capture and analysis software.In order to capture packets, several things are required: Instead, here we look at the practical aspects of capturing voice packets. How to choose the location of capture is something that we covered in our recent article on troubleshooting poor voice quality and will not be elaborated upon here. So, when voice degradation strikes, one of the first things you should do to determine the cause of the issue is capture packets at strategic locations within your network. Unless you have a sophisticated network monitoring system that observes and records events on the network, it is unlikely that you will have in your infrastructure direct and immediate access to any pertinent information concerning the flow of voice packets. In this article, we examine practical methods for capturing voice packets at various locations within the network.

When people call TeleDynamics tech support, we sometimes ask them to show us their packet capture files so we can help identify the issue. One of the best methods for troubleshooting problems on the network to pinpoint the cause of poor voice quality or a disruption of VoIP services is to capture voice packets in real time and store them so we can analyze them later.
