Wireshark
Wireshark is the world’s foremost and widely-used network protocol analyzer. It lets you see what’s happening on your network at a microscopic level and is the de facto (and often de jure) standard across many commercial and non-profit enterprises, government agencies, and educational institutions. Wireshark development thrives thanks to the volunteer contributions of networking experts around the globe and is the continuation of a project started by Gerald Combs in 1998. Wireshark® is a network protocol analyzer. It lets you capture and interactively browse the traffic running on a computer network. It has a rich and powerful feature set and is world’s most popular tool of its kind. It runs on most computing platforms including Windows, macOS, Linux, and UNIX. Network professionals, security experts, developers, and educators around the world use it regularly. It is freely available as open source, and is released under the GNU General Public License version 2.
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CommView
CommView is a powerful network monitor and analyzer designed for LAN administrators, security professionals, network programmers, home users…virtually anyone who wants a full picture of the traffic flowing through a PC or LAN segment. Loaded with many user-friendly features, CommView combines performance and flexibility with an ease of use unmatched in the industry. This application captures every packet on the wire to display important information such as a list of packets and network connections, vital statistics, protocol distribution charts, and so on. You can examine, save, filter, import and export captured packets, view protocol decodes down to the lowest layer with full analysis of over 100 supported protocols. With this information, CommView can help you pinpoint network problems and troubleshoot software and hardware. The newest CommView version 7.0 introduced SSL/TLS traffic decryption on the fly.
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Sniffnet
Sniffnet is a network monitoring tool designed to help users easily keep track of their Internet traffic. Whether gathering statistics or inspecting in-depth network activities, Sniffnet provides comprehensive coverage. It emphasizes user experience, ensuring ease of use compared to other cumbersome network analyzers. Completely free and open source, Sniffnet is dual-licensed under MIT or Apache-2.0, with the full source code available on GitHub. Developed entirely in Rust, it leverages this modern programming language to build efficient and reliable software, emphasizing performance and safety. Key features include selecting a network adapter to inspect, applying filters to observed traffic, viewing overall statistics and real-time charts of Internet traffic, exporting comprehensive capture reports as PCAP files, identifying over 6,000 upper-layer services, protocols, trojans, and worms, discovering domain names and ASNs of hosts, pinpointing connections in the local network.
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tcpdump
Tcpdump is a powerful command-line packet analyzer that allows users to display the contents of network packets transmitted or received over a network to which the computer is attached. It operates on most Unix-like systems, including Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and macOS, utilizing the libpcap library for network traffic capture. Tcpdump can read packets from a network interface card or from a previously created saved packet file, and it provides options to write packets to standard output or a file. Users can apply BPF-based filters to limit the number of packets processed, enhancing usability on networks with high traffic volumes. The tool is distributed under the BSD license, making it free software. In many operating systems tcpdump is available as a native package or port, which simplifies installation of updates and long-term maintenance.
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