How to check the SIP registry on the Asterisk Debug Page

When a phone will not register or a carrier trunk goes quiet, you do not have to guess from the symptom. VICIdial gives you a window straight into the dialer's view of the world: the Asterisk Debug Page. It is the fastest way to confirm whether a device is actually registered or only thinks it is.

What registration means

In SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), a phone or trunk announces itself to the server by registering, which tells the dialer where to send calls for that endpoint. Until that registration succeeds, Asterisk has no path to the device and calls will not flow. A SIP peer is the dialer's record of one such endpoint — an agent phone, a Softphone, or a carrier trunk — and the registry is the running list of who is currently checked in with the SIP registrar. If a peer is not registered, nothing else you try downstream will work.

What the Asterisk Debug Page shows

The Asterisk Debug Page prints the dialer's raw output for three things in one screen:

• SIP Peers and Registry — the list of SIP endpoints and the outbound registrations the dialer is maintaining, including whether each peer is reachable.
• IAX Peers and Registry — the same view for IAX2 endpoints, which is mostly relevant if you trunk between servers.
• The last 1000 lines of Asterisk CLI output — but only if your server settings have that capture enabled.

Confirming a phone or trunk is registered

flowchart TD
  A[Open Asterisk Debug Page] --> B[Find the peer by name]
  B --> C{Peer listed}
  C -->|No| D[Wrong server or name never registered]
  C -->|Yes| E{Status shows reachable}
  E -->|Unreachable| F[Network or credentials wrong]
  E -->|OK| G[Registered check registry line]
  G --> H{Registry shows Registered}
  H -->|No| I[Trunk registration string failing]
  H -->|Yes| J[Endpoint is up look elsewhere]

Work the page in this order. First, find your peer by its name in the SIP Peers section. If it is not there at all, you are either on the wrong server or the device never registered — check that the phone is pointed at the right host. If the peer is listed but shows as unreachable, the registration lapsed; that points at network reachability or wrong credentials. For a carrier trunk, scroll to the Registry lines: a healthy outbound registration reads as registered, while a failing one will keep retrying and never settle.

Common things the page reveals

• An agent phone missing entirely — usually a wrong server address or a phone entry that was never built into the conf files.
• A peer that flaps between reachable and unreachable — typically a NAT or firewall problem dropping the keepalive packets.
• A trunk registry line stuck retrying — the registration string, username, or password the carrier expects is wrong.

Because this page reads live from the dialer, it is the ground truth. If the device is registered here but still misbehaving, the problem is past registration — audio, routing, or dialplan — and you can stop chasing the registration angle.

Where to go next

For a fuller walkthrough of the screen and its sections, read how to use the Asterisk Debug Page. When a phone simply will not check in, the fix for a webphone that won't register walks the rest of the way, and the VICIdial troubleshooting playbook ties it into the wider checklist.

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