I totally love the way Fiddler neatly reduces a flood of HTTP information to just the stuff I want to see.
I was wondering whether there is a utility out there that does the same for socket operations and calls? WireShark/Etherial is great, but the flood of data makes it difficult to easily understand what is going on?
Is there something out for akin to Fiddler, but for sockets?
Yep. Its called Wireshark.
I think that what you need to look into is how to use filters effectively in Wireshark. Reading the information gets a lot easier when you have a good filter (or two) in place.
I don't have a better alternative to Wireshark, but here are a couple of things that have helped me harness the beast--er shark.
Right-click on a packet and do a 'Follow TCP Stream' to see all the communication on that socket for that particular session.
Use the correct filter for the data you are looking for. For HTTP, just type 'http' in the filters box and hit apply. All the TCP/UDP packets are hidden and the parsed HTTP request and responses are the ones that are shown. When you select a HTTP request/response, you can expand it to see the reconstructed request/response.
Again, the filters are your friend in Wireshark. It is very powerful and can save you lots of time when you apply the correct filter.