The work studies diferent approaches to identify damping in structural vibrations with emphasis on direct damping methods. Strain based direct damping identifcation method is developed. Two numerical experiments and experiment on real structure for the displacement and strain based direct damping identifcation are performed. Strain based and displacement based method identify equal damping in respective matrices. Amount of damping and different signal to noise ratios do not have effect on identifcation procedure. Strain to displacement transform can be used for model degrees of freedom expansion.