// the find
sipcapture/homer
HOMER - 100% Open-Source SIP, VoIP, RTC Packet Capture & Monitoring
Homer is a SIP/VoIP packet capture and analysis platform that's been around since 2011. Version 11 is a significant architectural overhaul: Go rewrite, DuckDB/DuckLake as the storage backend (Parquet files instead of Postgres), and Arrow/FlightSQL for data access. It's for telecom engineers who need to debug SIP call flows, track QoS metrics, and correlate RTC sessions across their infrastructure.
The DuckDB pivot is genuinely smart — columnar storage for time-series packet data means you can run analytical queries over days of SIP traffic without a dedicated OLAP database. HEP is the de-facto standard for SIP capture agent integration, and Homer invented it, so every major SIP stack (Kamailio, OpenSIPS, Asterisk) speaks this protocol natively. The modular deployment story (writer-only edge nodes feeding a shared S3/object storage pool, coordinator-only for the UI) solves real operational problems at scale. The CLI's PCAP export from search results is a practical timesaver — grab a call by Call-ID, hand a .pcap to Wireshark.
Homer 11 is a full rewrite and the migration docs for Homer 7/10 are explicitly marked 'untested' — if you're running production Homer 7, you're on your own getting there. DuckDB's embedded nature means no concurrent writers; if you need multi-process ingest at high volume, you're pushed into the edge+storage topology which adds operational complexity. The built-in games (chess, netris) and LLM/MCP integration feel like demos bolted onto a serious ops tool — they add surface area without adding value for the target user. AGPL-3.0 licensing will block adoption anywhere legal has opinions about copyleft in network tooling.