
This network traffic analysis would give us a number of information like – the destination and source of communication, amount of data transferred, location of the destination server, any ongoing attacks on the server, and much more that is why a continuous monitoring of the network becomes important.

You can send anything to anyone over the internet for example – email, picture, text, etc.Įven though these data is accessed as a whole at both the source and the destination but this data is not sent across the internet as a whole, these are sent separately as different characters or as small packages known as packets, these packets when received at the destination is reassembled in the form of your originally intended message and because there would exchange of a large number of packets via the network there would resulting traffic and this is known as N etwork Traffic. It is the most widely used format.Everything nowadays is connected to many things through different modes and the internet remains the primary mode of connection, and when something is connected to the internet or any network for that matter there is always a mutual exchange of data.

Wireshark allows you to save file in multiple extensions but for our purpose we will use. We can create a tcpdump file for the captured traffic. Live data can be read from different types of networks, including Ethernet, IEEE 802.11, PPP, and loopback. It is used for network troubleshooting, analysis, software and communications protocol development, and education."īasically, Wireshark is an open source tool to analyse network traffic or simply speaking, Wireshark captures data from a LAN wire, or from a live network connection or read from a file of already-captured packets. But in some cases its unencrypted also, but that is rare.Īccording to Wikipedia, "Wireshark is a free and open source packet analyser. Generally, the information is encrypted for obvious reasons.

Destination: The Sink where packets reach finally.Source: Source from which the packet originated.Time: Time at which packets are captured.So, how does the network traffic looks like:Ībove is a screenshot, showing all the information which is sent over along with data packets on a network. Traffic volume = Traffic Intensity * Time Network Traffic or Network Data is the amount of data(packets) moving across a network at any given point of time. Before we start with Wireshark, let's have an understanding about what exactly is Network traffic and how can it be calculated.
