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Sipfront Documentation

Welcome to the documentation of the Sipfront telco testing service.

About Sipfront

Sipfront is a telecom SaaS to test real-time communication systems end to end. It's intended to help you

  • monitor 24/7 if your services works properly by simulating calls on a scheduled basis,
  • notifies you in real-time if calls fail or call metrics start diverting from expected values,
  • and to lets you run ad-hoc tests to check for regressions.

What we do, and why

We simulate end customers by initiating and/or receiving actual calls. This is done by either emulating end customer SIP devices, or by actually running your mobile apps on actual hardware. That way, you will see actual calls on your network, performed on a regular schedule or ad-hoc, with pre-defined parameters.

"Why Sipfront, if we already have a passive monitoring solution such as Homer/VoipMonitor/... in place?", you might ask.

Active testing and monitoring via Sipfront is the perfect addition to a passive monitoring solution, because

  • you can run test calls for very specific scenarios, and if they fail, troubleshoot them via your passive monitor system,
  • you can monitor traffic in times where there's low to no customer traffic (e.g. night times),
  • you can enrich your data by the actual end customer view, since our endpoints bu default sit outside your infrastructure.

Types of tests we support

Currently we provide the following types of tests:

  • Functional Tests: check within a single call if call scenarios like A calls B work on signaling and media level, by simulating either the A-party, the B-party or both.
  • Load Tests: run up to tens of thousands of concurrent registrations and/or calls and check if your system can catch up with the calls per second on a signaling level, and the concurrent calls on a media level, by simulating either A, B, or both.
  • Mobile App Tests: launch your Android and iOS VoIP apps on a range of physical devices, simulate the user input on your app's GUI to place calls, and verify and measure on a signaling and media level if the calls are actually established and are within expected metrics ranges.

Alternatives

At Sipfront we use and extend open source software such as baresip, sipp, kamailio and rtpengine. Our team has decades of experience developing and running these pieces of software. If you've specifically used software such as

  • pjsip
  • baresip
  • sipp
  • sipsak
  • Asterisk
  • Freeswitch

to implement your own testing and monitoring solution, and you'd consider moving this to a managed service, you're at the right place. We've been there, we've done that, and we're now 100% focused on providing a good solution to replace these self-made scripts in a way that

  • scales, and
  • doesn't produce all these false alarms.

Nevertheless, the components mentioned above are extremely flexible, so if Sipfront is not the right tool for you, you probably should check these, as they're capable to perform the tests you might be looking for, without committing to a commercial solution such as Sipfront.