use wireshark to monitor network traffic

The best way to see this is to see it in action. The protocol analyzer really just reads pcap data and then - here’s where the term comes from - analyzes it in a way that we can look at it. It’s either going to save it into a file or it’s going to make a live feed directly into the protocol analyzer. So a sniffer grabs all this information, and then the sniffer’s going to do one of two things. So all the ethernet information, all the IP information, all the application information - it’s all there and these tools grab it. And when I say grabbing all the data, I mean all of the data. And these are tools that are actually grabbing all the data that’s going in and out of a particular interface.

The sniffer is some type of software, and it usually has a name like Pcap (packet capture), WinPcap, Npcap or Win10Pcap. The first piece is what I’m going to call the sniffer. (0:56–1:58) Now, before I start opening one up and letting you look at it, you need to understand that there are two very separate pieces to any protocol analyzer.

Use wireshark to monitor network traffic