Santa’s Bag was Full

The Elves are working furiously on the next version of Network Monitor 3.2. But it seems that NM3.2 won’t be under the tree for Christmas for this season. In a few more months, however, we will have a new Beta available for public consumption. And you can’t blame Santa, his bag already stuffed with Xboxes and such. Room in his bag should be reserved for children’s gifts you know. So you will have something under the tree for Christmas we will give you a sneak preview of the new things we are working on.

Stocking Stuffers

The first thing you’ll notice with NM3.2 is that the UI has been tweaked a bit. We moved around some items to make them more visible like Reassembly and Find. We’ve, err I mean the Elves, created a Most Recently Used list on the Start Page to make opening previous captures a quick operation. We uncluttered the tool bar to get rid of some of the lesser used items. And we are still envision more changes for NM3.2, like single line filter boxes to go along with our multi-line filters, as well as a way to get rid of windows you don’t use as often. This streamed line UI should give you more real-estate and make discoverability of some lesser used, but powerful, features more prominent.

All I Want is to Open LibPCap/WinPCap Files

And now you’ll be able to with NM3.2. One of the advantages of the NM3 capture file format is that we can store data from multiple network interfaces in the same file. But that makes it impossible to save as a LibPCap format, with out splitting the traffic. But why should we limit you from opening LibPCap files? Now when you open a LibPCap file, we convert it in memory to our format and display it just like any other capture file. I’m sure this will please more than a few folks. At this point you can save it as a NM3 capture file if you wish.

Finding a Conversation in the Tree

No, not some lame version of the "12 Days of Christmas".  And I'm not referencing the Christmas tree, but rather the NM3 conversation tree. The conversation tree is very helpful for quickly narrowing down traffic, but I’m sure you have had more than one occasion to locate the current frame in the tree. A exciting new feature we now have is the ability to right click a frame and highlight that conversation in the tree. This in turn filters the traffic based on that conversation. The cool thing this is this is not limited to TCP conversations. You can filter on any conversation as displayed by the Conv ID column, like all traffic for that machine-to-machine conversation or just HTTP level traffic.

The Big Gifts

I’ve noticed that some kids will often save the biggest gifts for last. I guess the assumption is that the larger the gift the grander the surprise. Of course, you occasionally get the big box stuffed with socks and underwear from Grandma. No such disappointment here.

NM Application Interface

We get asked about Experts all the time. The availability of the API is a giant step in that direction. While it’s much more than just a way to create experts, it allows a simple programming interface to query and access data fields using our parsing engine. This means you can create applications where only your imagination is the limit. Not only can you look into the packet data, you can also control the NM capturing engine. So you can design programs to stop/start captures based on whatever events you have.

Let me give you an example of the applications I’ve already tinkered with. Perhaps at some point when the API is released, we can also release some of these examples.

TopUsers – Lists traffic based on IPv4, IPv6, MacAddresses, and show columns for bytes sent, frames sent, etc. Simply click on a column header to sort and find out who is the chattiest user on your network.

EventCap - Lets you capture data until a certain Event error appears in the Event Log. This gives you a simple way to capture traffic leading up to a failure logged in the Event Log.  Basically a one step version of the blog I wrote on this subject: (https://blogs.technet.com/netmon/archive/2007/02/22/eventmon-stopping-a-capture-based-on-an-eventlog-event.aspx)

FiltCap – Lets you query capture data using a simple SQL like command and export that data as a CSV (Comma Delimited File). No longer are you trapped by the limitations of what the UI can do. You can use your favorite tool to graph and analyze trace data.

Process Tracking

I’m often trouble shooting traffic from a specific application. I want to know why Internet Explorer isn’t working properly. Process tracking is a way to show data based on the application that is sending it. Our final design will create new Nodes in the conversation tree that show each process that is running and then allow you to filter on only that traffic when you click on that Node.

We’ll even save that data from the capturing machine so that given you’ve taken the trace with NM3.2, you’ll have all the data necessary to see the processes that were running at the time the capture was taken. Imagine how much faster you’ll be able to narrow down a specific problem with this new feature!

Now How Much Would You Pay…

While we are not done adding features, these are the major ones we have so far. We plan to release a Beta in the early part of next year (we think April time frame). And while we haven’t been able to add every feature people have asked for, and there’s been a bunch of them, we are hoping this next version has a little of everything for everyone.

Happy Holidays from the Network Monitor Team