captagent vs heplify

[George Matheou]

Hello, 

I would like to ask what is the difference between captagent and heplify. In the official website (https://sipcapture.org/#features-icons) the heplify agent is not included. In the website it is mentioned that captagent supports: HEP3 and QoS. What about heplify? 

Thank you in advance,

George Matheou

[Lorenzo Mangani]

Hello George,

Fair question - As explained in a few of our past presentations, they are simply two separate implementation of an HEP3 Capture Agent.

Heplify was design by Negbie to be statically compiled, portable and simple - and he definitely succeeded at that task with go - so if you want a no brainer HEP capture agent, that's the best choice. Captagent is made in C and tends to be more feature rich, supports more protocols and it is definitely more configurable (and thus, misconfigurable too) but it does come with various library requirements, although standard and simple ones, so its less portable.

They both have the baseline ability to sniff/reassemble packets using different methods (pcap/af_packet/etc) and emit HEP3 SIP/RTCP/LOG packets with native correlation which makes for the common needs of most projects but the best fit for either should always be determined on a per-case basis.

I hope this helps!

Lorenzo

[George Matheou]

Hello Lorenzo,

Thank you for your prompt reply. Is there any documentation about which QoS features are supported by captagent? And are these features supported by heplify?  

Thank you,

George

[Lorenzo Mangani]

George,

There is not much to document specifically, the clients offer a command helper, they are open-source and well covered in our presentations and material in general.

In Homer-land, QoS reports are just intended as correlated media reports, which for both agents in question are based on RTCP packets converted to HEP Type 5 RTCP packets w/ correlation_id pointed at the SIP session SDP associates them with, and for the rest they are the same HEP Type 5 packets Asterisk/Freeswitch/RTP:Engine/RTPProxy can generate when configured to do so. On top of that, the backend can also produce timeseries with those metrics.

[George Matheou]

Thank you very much Lorenzo!