Wireshark: How to Identify RTP stream Packet Drop

You might have seen issues like choppy voice, unclear deferred video etc in your network. This kind of problem can become a little difficult to isolate because you need to check all the devices in the path and different teams like network admins, voip team, video teams need to collaborate. Very recently I have come across a situation like this and I came to know about a wonderful way to identify RTP packet drops quickly between the two nodes.

You may come across situation where you are unable to notice any drops on the devices with verification commands. Then you just have to rely on hop by hop packet capture and then compare them to see if all the set of captures have equal number of packets or not. The one with less number of captures will indicate some drops. But we have a better way to do this with wireshark. Once you have the capture available filter the captures for RTP packets. Then go to Telephony>RTP >RTP Stream

 

RTP packet drops
Wireshark

 

This will pop up following window which will tell you the percentage of RTP packet drops between the nodes.

RTP packet drops
Packet drops

 

This method has been proven very helpful in complex network scenario where often people get confused how to identify the node which is dropping packet.

Thanks for visiting my blog, stay tuned for more.

 

 

 

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