How do I monitor a port for traffic in Windows?

Question

I am trying to find a solution to monitor the traffic (in and out) through a specific port. It is not required to capture the packets, or do anyting else. What it does is to be a traffic listener to make sure there are messages sent to or received from this port every 10 minutes. It has to be running at the background all the time (like a daemon), and without significant performance impact. Based on my research, one choice is to use an existing tool to do that. There are a bunch of tools out there to monitor or sniff the traffic, such as wireshark. Well, seems most of them monitor the traffic passing through a interface, instead of a port, or they can't run as a daemon. Another choice to write a program to do this. SharpPcap seems to be a good choice, but I still need to capture and analyze the packets to know whether such traffic exist. Could somebody suggest what I should do?

Answer 1

The best way that will limit the impact your tool will have on performance is via an ETW (Event Tracing for Windows) Real-time Consumer (i.e. a tool that activates an ETW trace and reads it immediately instead of saving it to a file). This MSDN sample is a great way to see how to do this via C# and it gives you some code to get started.