Even if you are forced to connect your laptop near the router, you can quickly put an address filter in and keep the traffic focused on your target device. If you’re troubleshooting in real time and you know the device that’s having issues, then the using a laptop can be of value.įirstly, you know where to plug it in, so you can limit the amount of data it is going to see. We need to start with the approach you’re trying to take.

So, the questions are, is my laptop still a reliable way to troubleshoot these issues and how can I over-come the problem of having several million packets to sort through? Diehard packet engineers will always look to their laptop in these situations but the one area that seems to be defeating them is the sheer volume of packets that a simple 5 minute capture can generate. Laptop performance keeps improving, but the amount of data in our networks keeps increasing too. There is a traditional argument about the performance of laptops and their ability to capture accurately. The vast majority of us will be using Wireshark on our laptops, a few people use dedicated PCs or servers but there is an increasing trend in using some sort of specialist capture engines, why is this? However, whether the software is free or paid for, it can only be as good as the information that gets passed up to it. Even the more expensive analysers with extended problem databases and issue recognition features all support the WireShark file formats, which have become a “defacto” file standard these days. It’s no coincidence that it’s free, but it is also quite capable. The most popular packet capture solution in the world is WireShark.

Wireshark capture packets on my device