PRTG’s approach to network monitoring is based on sensors. PRTG by Paessler is a popular and powerful network monitor tool which does much more than IP sniffing. If you learn these, the tool is very powerful and flexible. There is a learning curve to find out the various filters needed to apply in order to search within packets and display only the packets you want. Personally I use Wireshark extensively in my work environment to either troubleshoot problems or inspect traffic for security purposes.
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This makes it relatively easy to get up to speed on not just how to use the tool, but also how it can help network administrators and other IT professionals improve the speed and efficiency of their networks.
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It also can read hundreds of network protocols and can do all of this in real time over a variety of networks, including Ethernet, PPP, Bluetooth, FDDI etc.Ī website full of information with a wealth of tutorials and documents tops all of this off, and they even conduct regular training on how to use their software. WireShark is available across various platforms, including Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, and others. This free tool is usually the de-facto first option for network and system engineers for capturing and analyzing network packets.
The ranking below is in no particular order: In this article I have researched some popular (both free and commercial) IP network sniffing tools and present them below with a brief description of each one. There are more options as we’ll see below. Of course, this is one way of capturing network traffic.
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The sniffing software is listening on the network interface card of the computer to collect all traffic which passes through the interface for analysis.
The easiest way to collect network traffic with a sniffing tool is to connect your computer (which has the sniffer software installed) on a SPAN port of a switch which basically copies all traffic passing through the switch to that SPAN port. That’s why network traffic should be encrypted wherever possible.Īs a network and security engineer I have been using network sniffing tools for decades. Of course, hackers can also use network sniffing tools to collect personal data such as passwords over a network. Many network administrators use these tools to determine the efficiency of a network, to troubleshoot communication problems, to identify common network bottlenecks etc. A network sniffer, or packet sniffer, is a specialized software (or even a hardware device) that listens in over a network and records the IP packets of data that travel through it.