SmartSniff

In order to add extra protection to your computer when navigating on the Internet, you can use a network analysis tool together with your antivirus solution. One example is SmartSniff, a lightweight and easy to use program that can capture TCP/IP packets.

This utility provides different methods for traffic monitoring, depending on whether you have a capture driver installed or not. But as long as the WinPcap is installed on your computer, it is recommended you set SmartSniff to use this capture driver.

Once you press the 'Start' button, the application displays all the captured packets in a table view, allowing you to view the protocol type (TCP, UDP or ICMP), local and remote addresses, ports and hosts, the number of packets and the data size, the data speed and the capture time.

Users can set the application to display only network traffic statistics, without storing the captured data, as well as retrieve process information during monitoring.

The captured packets, together with their detailed information can be displayed as an ASCII (for text-based protocols), HEX dump or URL list. Also, you have the possibility to create filters in order to track only certain types of conversations. The TCP/IP stream data can be exported and the application can easily generate HTML reports or save the packet summaries on your disk for later analysis.

To ease the monitoring process, you can apply different color schemes for connections that come from a local or a remote machine.

Designed with simplicity in mind, SmartSniff can help you view the conversations between servers and clients and detailed information regarding the captured packets. Although it does not come with advanced tools for packet analysis, this network traffic monitoring application comes in handy if you just want to monitor the data that passes through your adapter.