Check this before opening a VICIdial ticket

A calm self-check list: clock, agent screen, carrier registration, hopper, dispositions, and which log report matches your symptom.

When the dialer misbehaves, the fastest path to a fix is usually a few minutes of looking before you write a ticket. Most problems come from one of a handful of boring causes, and you can rule those out yourself. Even when you can't, walking the checklist collects the facts a support person would ask for anyway, so the ticket you open is one they can act on right away.

Start with the obvious

Work top to bottom. Each step is a yes-or-no question, and most of them take under a minute.

Is the server clock right? A drifted clock makes the dialer judge call-time windows and timestamps against the wrong now. Run date on the box and compare it to a phone. If it is off by more than a couple of seconds, that is your first suspect.
Is the agent screen reachable? Open it in a browser yourself. If it loads for you but not for an agent, the problem is that agent's network or workstation, not the dialer. If Latency between the agent's browser and the box keeps spiking, sessions lose sync and feel frozen.
Is the carrier registered? Check that your Trunk shows registered. If the Carrier is not registered, every outbound call fails before it ever leaves the box, and no amount of dialer tweaking will help.
Does the hopper have leads? An empty Hopper looks exactly like a dead dialer — agents wait and nothing dials. Confirm the campaign has callable leads loaded and that the hopper is filling.
What does the recent disposition mix look like? Glance at the live Real-time report. A sudden wall of one status — all busy, all no-answer, all dropped — tells you where to look next.

Write down what you find at each step, even the green ones. "Clock correct, carrier registered, hopper has 2,000 leads, but 90 percent of calls disposition as failed" is a far better ticket than "dialer is broken."

Match the symptom to a log report

VICIdial keeps a separate debug report for each layer of a call, and the trick is picking the one that matches your symptom instead of reading them all.

Calls fail or behave oddly at dial time: read the Dial Log Report, which lists each call by lead, server, and the SIP response code it ended on. See how to read the Dial Log Report for the field-by-field walkthrough.
Calls connect then drop early or get strange release reasons: the Hangup Cause Report shows the carrier's hangup cause per call. A single Hangup cause dominating the list points straight at the carrier or the number plan.
You suspect the carrier itself: the Carrier Log captures every dial attempt and response code leaving the box.
Your numbers get flagged or blocked: the Caller ID Log shows which CID (caller ID) values a campaign used and how often.
Live calls hit answering machines: the AMD Log shows what Answering Machine Detection decided on each call.
Agent screens feel laggy or frozen: the Agent LAGGED Report and the Agent Latency Report show when an agent's screen lost sync with the dialer.

The self-check path

flowchart TD
  A[Something is wrong] --> B{Clock correct?}
  B -- No --> Z[Fix time sync first]
  B -- Yes --> C{Agent screen loads?}
  C -- No --> Y[Check agent network and latency]
  C -- Yes --> D{Carrier registered?}
  D -- No --> X[Fix trunk registration]
  D -- Yes --> E{Hopper has leads?}
  E -- No --> W[Load or fix the hopper]
  E -- Yes --> F[Read the matching log report]

Resist the urge to change a dozen settings at once. Change one thing, watch the Real-time report and the relevant log, then decide. Bulk changes make it impossible to tell what fixed or broke something.

When you do open the ticket

Bring the facts you gathered: the clock check, the carrier state, the hopper count, the disposition mix, and a few example lead IDs from the log report that matched. With those in hand, support skips the back-and-forth and goes straight to the cause. The deeper trace path is covered in the VICIdial troubleshooting playbook.

On a managed box, most of this checklist is watched for you, so you rarely reach the ticket stage at all. VICIfast runs a hardened VICIdial server with time sync, carrier monitoring, and health checks set up from the start, live in under 40 seconds. See our plans and pricing.