About RTCanary
RTCanary is synthetic monitoring for real-time voice and video: scheduled test calls that tell you when a WebRTC room, a TURN server, a SIP trunk, a voice-AI agent or a realtime API stops working the way a user needs it to.
Why it exists
Most monitoring stacks check HTTP endpoints. Real-time media fails in ways that never touch an HTTP endpoint: a TURN server stops allocating relays, an SBC rewrites SDP, a route change raises jitter, a voice agent starts answering a second late or drifts off its script. The server logs stay clean, the dashboards stay green, and the first signal is a support ticket. A canary participant that joins the call every minute from outside your network sees these failures the moment they start. That is the whole product.
How it is built
A probe is a real client, not a packet generator. A WebRTC check runs in a headless Chromium with fake media devices and reads getStats(); a SIP check is a software endpoint speaking SIP over UDP, TCP or TLS and reading RTCP; a TURN check performs the STUN and TURN exchange itself; a phone check places a call through the carrier network. Metrics follow the published standards (RFC 3550, RFC 8445, RFC 8656, the W3C WebRTC Statistics API, ITU-T G.107) so that a number on the dashboard means the same thing as the number in the specification.
Conversation checks for voice agents run scripted dialogues against the live agent and score each turn, first with deterministic rules and, where you ask for it, with a rubric-based judge whose output is stored next to the run. Results are available on the dashboard, through the REST API and through an MCP server so that the people and the agents on call see the same trace.
How the guides are written
Articles on this site are published under the byline RTCanary Editorial. Every number, formula and vendor claim links to its primary source: an RFC, an ITU-T recommendation or the vendor's own documentation. Where a value is an estimate or a model output, the text says so. Articles are reviewed against their sources quarterly; the review date is shown on each article when it changes.
Contact
Email hello@rtcanary.com for sales, support, corrections to a guide, or press. Company details are stated in the service agreement each customer receives.