Free Network Monitor

Question

I am having trouble integrating two products, one of which is mine and they appear not to be talking. So I want to make sure they are communicating correctly. I had a look around for network monitor and found TCP Spy. This works but only shows 1 side of the conversation at a time (it has to run locally) I would ideally like to see both sides at the same time - but you can't run two copies of TCP Spy.

I've hit Sourceforge, but nothing seems to jump out - I'm a Windows developer, I don't have perl installed.

I've found a couple of others which are cripple-ware and totally useless, so I was wondering what do the SO guys use for watching the TCP conversation?

BTW - the 'not-written-here' product is not a browser.

Answer 1

I'm not sure if it does everything you want, but have you seen WireShark and the Microsoft Network Monitor?

Answer 2

Wireshark (previously Ethereal)

Wireshark is an award-winning network protocol analyzer developed by an international team of networking experts.

Answer 3

I use wireshark. Very good and free.

Answer 4

Would Wireshark (formerly Ethereal) help?

Echo.....echo......echo.... :)

Answer 5

Wireshark is a really good and mature network sniffer. It's been around for years.

• Deep inspection of hundreds of protocols, with more being added all the time
• Live capture and offline analysis
• Decryption support for many protocols, including IPsec, ISAKMP, Kerberos, SNMPv3, SSL/TLS, WEP, and WPA/WPA2
• Coloring rules can be applied to the packet list for quick, intuitive analysis
• Output can be exported to XML, PostScript®, CSV, or plain text

Answer 6

Wireshark, aka Ethereal comes with a fair amount of TCP sniffing functionality.

http://www.wireshark.org/

Answer 7

Strange that I did not see WireShark when I visited SourceForge. The top result of the 60 returned was a bizarre german thing.

Answer 8

Wireshark is great.. but another option would be via PowerShell. I've used the Get-Packet script from Jeff Hicks at Sapien Technologies as a really lightweight packet sniffer. You get custom objects representing your packets and can do whatever filtering you need to via PowerShell. The other script in the pair is Analyze-Packet, which can summarize the results of a packet capture.

Answer 9

I tried Wireshark and Microsoft Network Monitor, but neither detected my (and the program I am trying to communicate with) transfer. If I had a day to sit and configure it I probably could get it working but I just wanted the bytes sent and, more specifically, bytes received.

In the end I found HHD Software's Accurate Network Monitor software which did what I wanted it to, even if it was slight clunky.

Answer 10

Take a look at Tcpdump It is not a full fledged GUI network analyzer (not at all) but it is usable in scripts. Since I am more a Linux person, I use it with Bash and Python, but you should be able to call it from powershell.

Answer 11

With respect to using Windows and lacking Perl: Why not try Strawberry Perl? It's a free Perl distribution that's run by the Perl community (specifically Adam Kennedy at the core), is easy to install, and wields the full power of CPAN out of the box.