Wireshark is perhaps one of the best open source packet analyzers available today. Wireshark is a powerful packet analyzer tool, with an easy-to-use, rich GUI and a command-line utility with very active community support: http://ask.wireshark.org.
Wireshark uses pcap
(libpcap
) to capture packets, which means it can capture packets in offline mode—to view the captured packets—and online mode (live traffic) to capture and display the traffic in the Wireshark GUI. Once open, the Wireshark GUI looks like this:
We will see some of the important features that are available in Wireshark in the following figure:
Wireshark has the following cool built-in features, few of them are listed as follows:
The Wireshark installation provides some command-line tools such as
dumpcap
and tshark
. Wireshark and tshark
rely on dumpcap
to capture traffic; more advanced functionality is performed by tshark
. Also note that dumpcap
can be run as its own standalone utility. tshark
is a command-line version of Wireshark and can be used in the remote terminal.
The user must be aware of where Wireshark is installed and it should be obliged with your organization policy before start capturing on the TAP (Test Access Point) or Switch Port Analyzer (SPAN) port.
Usually developers install Wireshark on their personal laptop/desktop and capture packets, which goes in-out from the box.
Certain guidelines should be followed to perform this:
WinPCap
to be installed3.144.22.162