HOMER is a capture server that records SIP signalling and call quality statistics from voice over IP networks and lets you search them from a browser. It belongs to the SIPCAPTURE project, whose code is released on GitHub under the AGPL v3 licence with copyright held by the company QXIP BV. The repository describes the project as active since 2011, which makes HOMER a long established name in VoIP traffic observation.
The current branch, Homer 11, departs sharply from the versions 7 and 10 that many operators still run. Everything now lives in a single program written in Go that receives packets, stores them and serves the user interface.
What HOMER is for
The whole system relies on HEP, the Homer Encapsulation Protocol. A device or a lightweight agent duplicates each SIP or RTCP packet, or each log line, wraps it in a HEP header and ships it to the HOMER server while leaving the original datagram untouched. The sipcapture.org site lists software that speaks HEP version 3 out of the box, including Kamailio, OpenSIPS, Asterisk, RTPEngine, sngrep and sipgrep, with FreeSWITCH supporting version 2. Where no native support exists, the heplify agent, written in Go by the same team, sniffs a network interface and forwards what it sees.
On the server, Homer 11 is split into four modules switched on in a homer.json file. The ingest module listens on UDP, TCP, TLS, HTTP or HTTPS. The storage module writes Parquet files into a DuckLake catalogue, on local disk or object storage, and queries them through the DuckDB engine. A node module answers queries over gRPC or HTTP and offers Arrow FlightSQL access for Grafana, while a coordinator exposes the REST API behind the built in web interface. The README also covers SIPREC recording feeds, VQ-RTCPXR quality reports and an mcp subcommand aimed at assistants built on large language models.
In daily use, an engineer types a phone number, a Call-ID or a time window and gets the matching dialogues. A ladder diagram shows the call from INVITE to BYE, every SIP message can be read in full, and the capture can be exported as a PCAP file for Wireshark. Disputes with an interconnect partner over a dropped call or one way audio are frequently settled this way.
HOMER neither generates traffic nor relays audio streams, since its job is observation. To load a platform with test calls you would reach for SIPp, and to relay media you would use RTPEngine, both covered in our software library and both able to feed HOMER. SIP3, a name that sometimes appears next to HOMER, is a separate VoIP monitoring product whose Community Edition is released under the Apache 2.0 licence by a different team.
Who is it for?
HOMER suits telephony carriers, contact centre integrators and administrators of Kamailio, OpenSIPS or Asterisk platforms who need to locate one specific call among millions and show exactly what crossed the wire. Support staff gain a searchable history without logging into production servers.
It does assume a good grasp of SIP and of the network layout, because someone has to decide where agents go and which devices send HEP. Version 11 is still young, with short documentation and migration guides from versions 7 and 10 published as untested drafts, so existing deployments may want to stay on their current branch for a while. For a quick investigation on a single server, sngrep or Wireshark is enough, and for general network monitoring ntopng or LibreNMS, both in our library, answer a different need.
Download HOMER safely
Official builds come only from the sipcapture organisation on GitHub. Each release ships homer-core .deb and .rpm packages for amd64 and arm64 processors, two standalone binaries and the source archives. The official Docker image lives on ghcr.io as sipcapture/homer, and the documentation at sipcapture.github.io/homer walks through the configuration wizard and the Grafana integration. The heplify agent is available as a binary for Linux, Apple silicon Macs and Windows, the latter needing Npcap.
The software costs nothing. For professional support, sipcapture.org points to hepic, a separate commercial offer that nobody is obliged to buy. Bear in mind that a capture server keeps phone numbers, IP addresses and sometimes authentication headers, so a package pulled from an unknown mirror or a Docker image pushed under another account could leak that data. Sticking to files published by the sipcapture organisation is the sensible choice.
Frequently asked questions
Is HOMER free?
Yes. The server, the interface and the agents are released under the AGPL v3 licence with no paid edition. Only support and related services may be charged for by third parties, such as the hepic offer mentioned on the official site.
How does HOMER differ from SIP3?
They are two unrelated projects run by different teams. HOMER comes from SIPCAPTURE and is built around the HEP protocol. SIP3 is another VoIP monitoring product, written in Kotlin, whose Community Edition is licensed under Apache 2.0.
Should I move to Homer 11 right away?
There is no rush for a stable installation. The documentation offers upgrade guides from Homer 7 and Homer 10, but labels them as untested drafts. Running Homer 11 side by side before switching over is the safer path.
