Even so, the tool is quite useful and does a great job of capturing network traffic. NAST (Network Analyzer Sniffer Tool) is an ncurses-based tool that has, admittedly, not been under development for quite some time. Other features include: powerful display filters rich VoIP analysis read/write many different capture file formats capture files can be compressed with on the fly live data can be read from Ethernet, IEEE 802.11, PPP/HDLC, ATM, Bluetooth, USB, Token Ring, Frame Relay, FDDI, and others decryption support coloring rules output can be exported to XML, PostScript, CSV, or plain text. This analyzer features: Live capture and offline analysis standard three-pane packet browser multi-platform (Windows, Linux, OS X, Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and many others) captured network data can be browsed via GUI, or via the TTY-mode TShark utility. In fact, Wireshark is often considered the de facto standard among the industry. Wireshark is one of the most powerful network protocol analyzers on the market (free or paid). This blog post is also available as a TechRepublic Photo Gallery. With that promise made, let’s dive in and see what’s what. From this list, you should be able to find the one tool that perfectly suits your needs.

To help narrow the search for you, I’ve found five of the best network analyzers available. But for most network admins, the free tools do a solid-enough job to get you the information you need.īut which of these tools are the best? If you start looking, you’ll find plenty available. Once you start looking, you can find analyzers of every shape, size, and price. The tools I speak of are network analyzers. In order to gather that information, you need the right tools. Solid information leads to a strong and worry-free network (or at least as worry-free as you can manage). If you work on a network, you then know the value of information. Jack Wallen lists five tools that can get you that solid information for free. Solid information leads to a strong and worry-free network.

Five free network analyzers worth any IT admin’s time

Free network traffic analyzer