

Wireshark is available for Windows, Linux and Mac, making it ideal for mixed platform networks. The wealth of information that the program can reveal about network usage is staggering, and support for plugins means that the tool can be extended to add new protocols and features further down the line.

Wireshark boasts a graphical front end which makes it easy to analyse all traffic which travels over a network using a variety of protocols.ĭata packets can be captured from both wired and wireless network and this information can be viewed live as it is captured or analysed at a later date. Network analysers are nothing new, but they have a tendency to be impenetrable programs reliant on command line operations and provide information in a text based form which can be difficult to interpret. Some Windows versions requires WinPcap to be installed.If you've ever wondered just how your network is being used, Wireshark may be the tool you have been looking for. Coloring rules can be applied to the packet list, which eases analysis.Hundreds of protocols are supported, with more being added all the time.Capture files compressed with gzip can be decompressed on the fly.Read/write many different capture file formats: tcpdump (libpcap), NAI's Sniffer (compressed and uncompressed), Sniffer Pro, NetXray, Sun snoop and atmsnoop, Shomiti/Finisar Surveyor, AIX's iptrace, Microsoft's Network Monitor, Novell's LANalyzer, RADCOM's WAN/LAN Analyzer, HP-UX nettl, i4btrace from the ISDN4BSD project, Cisco Secure IDS iplog, the pppd log (pppdump-format), the AG Group's/WildPacket's EtherPeek/TokenPeek/AiroPeek, Visual Networks' Visual UpTime and many others.Live capture and offline analysis are supported.The most powerful display filters in the industry.Multi-interface: Along with a standard GUI, Wireshark includes TShark, a text-mode analyzer which is useful for remote capture, analysis, and scripting.Multi-platform: Runs on Windows, Linux, OS X, Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and many others.

Wireshark has a rich feature set which includes the following:

Hundreds of developers around the world have contributed to it, and it it still under active development. It is the continuation of a project that started in 1998. Wireshark is one of the world's foremost network protocol analyzers, and is the standard in many parts of the industry.
