How to use the Asterisk Debug Page to check SIP peers and registry

When a phone won't register or a carrier suddenly stops accepting calls, your first instinct is to SSH into the box and start typing Asterisk CLI commands. You don't have to. VICIdial ships a screen that runs those commands for you and prints the output right in the admin browser: the Asterisk Debug Page.

It shows the output of the SIP Peers and Registry, the IAX Peers and Registry, and the last 1000 lines of Asterisk CLI output, as long as CLI logging is turned on in your server's settings. That makes it the fastest way to answer one question: is the thing I expect to be registered actually registered?

What each section tells you

The page is built from raw Asterisk output, so it reads like a status dump. Here is what to look for in each block.

• SIP Peers — every device using SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) on this box, including agent phones and outbound trunks. Each SIP peer line shows whether it is reachable and its current latency in milliseconds. "UNREACHABLE" or "Unmonitored" next to a trunk is your smoking gun.
• SIP Registry — the outbound registrations this box is sending to your carrier. A healthy line ends in "Registered". "Request Sent" or "Auth. Sent" that never flips to Registered means the carrier is rejecting your Registration string.
• IAX Peers and Registry — the same view for any peers using IAX2 instead of SIP, which is common between dialer boxes in a multi-server setup.
• CLI output — the last 1000 lines of what Asterisk logged, where you'll see NOTICE and WARNING lines that explain a failed registration or a rejected call.

A simple read order

Work top down. Confirm the trunk is a registered SIP peer, confirm the registry line says Registered, then drop to the CLI tail only if the first two don't add up.

flowchart TD
  A[Open Asterisk Debug Page] --> B{Trunk in SIP Peers?}
  B -->|No, missing| C[Carrier config not loaded]
  B -->|Yes, UNREACHABLE| D[Network or firewall to carrier]
  B -->|Yes, OK| E{Registry says Registered?}
  E -->|No| F[Check credentials in registry string]
  E -->|Yes| G[Read CLI tail for call errors]

Common patterns and what they mean

A trunk that shows as a peer but reports UNREACHABLE usually means packets aren't getting to or from your carrier — a firewall change, a NAT problem, or the carrier having an outage on their side. A registry stuck at "Auth. Sent" almost always means a wrong username, password, or host in the trunk config talking to your SIP registrar. And if peers and registry both look fine but calls still fail, the CLI tail is where the real reason hides.

Treat this page as the entry point, not the whole investigation. Once you know a peer is unreachable, you'll often jump to a packet-level view. The companion SIP Event Report walkthrough shows how to trace a single failed registration message by message, and the full VICIdial troubleshooting playbook maps where this fits in a wider diagnosis.

When the page is healthy but calls still fail

If peers are reachable and the registry says Registered, the problem is rarely registration — it's routing, codec mismatch, or carrier-side rejection. At that point the Asterisk Debug Page has done its job: it ruled out the boring causes so you can stop guessing and look at the actual call flow.

On a VICIfast managed box the debug page is already wired up and CLI logging is on by default, so you can check SIP peers the moment something looks off instead of waiting on access. See what's included on every plan.