Colasoft Blog

By Shobhan Mandal

Colasoft Capsa Packet Analyzeris a free network analyzer software which can be used toanalyze and monitor WLAN andLAN networks. What it actually provides is network monitoring,in depth packet decoding, andadvanced protocol analysis of the network you are connected to. The best part is you do not have to install this software on a server to view the details; installing in any client machine of the network will provide you with all the necessary details.

Well the software has a number of functionalities, like:

• Troubleshooting Network Problems.
• Know about the performance of the network thus finding any bottlenecks.
• Can be used to detect virus,worms, or network attacks.
• It can also be used to teach and learn various things about network.

Here we will talk about the free version of Colasoft Capsa which has limited capabilities, like you can monitor the network continuously for 4 hours only using a profile and you can use only 1 analysis at a time.

How to use Colasoft Capsa Free Network Analyzer:

When you are downloading Colasoft Capsa, you will be asked to register with your email address. On this email address, you will be sent activation key, which will be valid for 4 months, after which you have to renew. The installation process will take a minute or two. After the installation is over you will get the home screen which looks like the first screenshot of this review.

At first, you have to select the connection from the adapter which you would like to monitor. When selected, it immediately shows a graph for the speed of the network.

The profile section allows you to select what type of analysis you would like to do. The software offers:

• Full Analysis
• HTTP Analysis
• Email Analysis
• DNS Analysis
• FTP Analysis
• IM Analysis
• Traffic Monitor

Full Analysis

Clicking on Full Analysis gives you various information regarding broadcast addresses, multicast addresses, local subnet, the IP addresses of the computer connected, etc. The center screen has various tabs like Protocol- tells about different protocols like IP, ARP, IPv6 and the amount of data and packets being transferred.

Physical Endpoint, IP Endpoint which tells about the MAC address and the IP address of the connected systems. Other tabs include TCP, IP, and UDP conversations. Somefunctionalities may not work in the free version.

HTTP Analysis

The HTTP analysis gives you the various results regarding HTTP protocol. At any normal instance it will give the IP address of the computers with which your computer has a HTP connection. Through the IP, TCP, and UDP conversation you can know the amount of data and packets being shared among the computers.

The other analysis gives out more information regarding data and packet movements in the network you are connected to.

Talking to one of my friends who is a ethical hacker and wants to remain anonymous, said that the software is great. According to him:

• This is really a great software and very powerful.
• It helps the network administrator to get various details about the network in real time.
• It can be used for educational purposes as the software tells how packet movement works actually in the network.

Downsides of the software

In the free version, the user cannot use more than one analysis simultaneously. If he wants to have a different analysis he must close the ongoing analysis. The free version has most of the good features restricted not allowing users to know the software’s working properly.

Also check out other network packet sniffer software.

Conclusion

It is a cool software to monitor the data traffic of your network. If you setup a private network you can watch out for any wrongdoings that might happen be happening in the network. It is very much useful for those who want to know more about computer networking.

Get Colasoft Capsa Packet Analyzer here.

Gizmo’s Freeware , a non-commercial community website staffed entirely by volunteers, published an article about Colasoft Capsa on Mar.6 2014 which reviewed Colaosft Capsa as the friendliest network traffic monitor ever.

Here’s the review written by Rob.Schifreen.

If you’ve ever wanted to be able to view a log of all the data that passes through your PC’s network connection (either wired or wifi), you may know that this is possible with a network protocol analyzer utility.  Such programs let you find out who your PC’s been talking to, and what was said.  You can view the content of every packet of data that travels to/from your PC and all of the remote computers and websites that you connect to.

By far the best-known of the network protocol analyzer software products is Wireshark.  It’s powerful, free, and does the job.  However, it also has a very steep learning curve and is far from intuitive to use.

Which is why I was so impressed to learn about a product recently called Capsa, which does a similar job but is way more friendly and much easier to understand.Capsa is from Colasoft, and you’ll find it at http://www.colasoft.com/capsa-free/.  Considering the full Enterprise version costs around $1000, the free no-commercial-use version, which offers pretty much all the features you’ll need, is a bargain.

It’s a 20 MB download, malware-free according to VirusTotal, and should work on all recent versions of Windows. So next time you need to know what’s eating up all the network bandwidth on a computer, or precisely what information a certain application is sending out about your PC, you can track it down with Capsa.

See more at Gizmo’s.

Capsa Network Analyzer Free Edition 7.7 Video Review

Today we use the Internet on a regular basis and in order to have a better experience while browsing we need a stable network.Capsa Network Analyzer Free Edition will provide it to you, because it constantly monitors your network, analyzes it and helps you prevent troubleshooting. The only limitation of the program is that you can start one project at a time. If you want more you have to buy the Enterprise version, which costs USD 995 for a one year license and maintenance. If you want to increase the time limit with one more year you have to buy it for additional USD 245. But if you don’t need the app for commercial usage you can use it for free without limitations.

Features

Several working modes
Analyzes networks
Monitors traffic
Shows statistics
Capsa Network Analyzer Free Edition lets you use several modes that are specialized for different tasks. With them you can make a full analysis of your network or you can choose to start theTraffic Monitor. Also, you can make a profile that is aimed at HTTP Analysis, Email Analysis, DNS Analysis, FTP Analysis and IM Analysis.

Interface

The interface of Capsa Network Analyzer Free Edition seems simple at first, but when you start any of the modes you see that it actually has a lot of sides to it. When you double-click on any of the profiles the app offers a lot of setup options that are used for the analysis. If you want to start the monitoring or the analysis you can click on the Start button and you will see that the app has a lot of instruments, which leads to a bit of a complicated interface. But after you spend some time with it you will see that all the monitoring and analysis utilities are easily used and you don’t have to be a specialist in order to use them.

Basic Operations

When you start the Full Analysis option of Capsa Network Analyzer Free Edition it opens a window for you that is comprised of different panes which show the most important functions of the program. With them you can monitor the traffic in bytes, the protocols, the IP conversations and perform many more analyses and monitoring functions. There are a lot of other instruments that you will find useful after you get used to them.

Conclusion

Capsa Network Analyzer Free Edition is a nice application not only because it is free, but also because with it you will be able to monitor all the aspects of your network. It offers a nice visualization for a vast number of utilities, so even though they are a lot you will still be able to use them without any problems.

Pros
Many utilities
Nice visualizations
Completely free version
Cons
None really

Editor review by softplanet.com

Learn more from Colasoft official website.

Reviewed by Michael Black on 13 Feb 2014 (version tested: 7.7.2)

Overview

Anyone working in the IT Industry could benefit from using Capsa Professional, this software is capable of tracking network activity to a very extensive degree. The list of available features goes on and on, with the main feature being detailed packet monitoring, and a tremendous amount of information regarding traffic on your network. Capsa also offers some really helpful guides for new users who aren’t familiar with this type of interface. Using this software can help you track down the root cause of a slow or unstable network, and also assist in fixing the problem.

Installation

You can download and install the 15 day trial of Capsa Professional for free, and it is only compatible with Windows. The trial is also limited in features, but you’ll still get the look and feel of the full program. No bundled software included, just a regular installation and you’re on your way.

Interface

Capsa Professional offers a large, scale-able interface, and is all around pretty easy to navigate once you become acquainted with the software. Most of the tools will open up in a new window, which ensures that your main screen never gets cluttered with different tabs. However, with this much information, it’s pretty much guaranteed to be overwhelming at first — unless you’re a seasoned network professional. In general, Colasoft did a great job organizing the extensive list of features, which is not an easy task.

Interface is a major issue with most suite-style network monitoring software, and it’s very refreshing to see something as well put together as Capsa.

Pros

Along with the aforementioned packet monitoring capabilities, intelligently organized UI, and the fact that it can narrow down network issues to help find the root cause of a problem, there’s plenty more. Capsa Professional can be used to scan all MAC addresses on your network, as well as grab their IPs, names, and information about the manufacturer. You can also monitor a specific network adapter, or multiple, such as your ethernet port, wfii adapter, or both.

The tutorials are fantastic as well, as mentioned above, and there are even specific guides such as “How to monitor Employee Website Visits”.

Cons

The program is stable, offers everything you’ll need in network monitoring, and there’s really nothing I can say that needs work at this point. Obviously the heavy price tag is a bit daunting, but considering this software is really only necessary in a large work environment, it’s nothing to complain about.

Alternatives

Also, Capsa even offers a free version, much more suited towards troubleshooting home network issues.

Conclusion

Troubleshooting network issues can be a major pain for any IT Technician, and I’ve personally been in that situation numerous times. Using Colasoft Capsa Professional will greatly reduce the time you spend trying to find the cause of these problems, and will help you get the issues resolved much quicker.

Requirements: P4 2.8G CPU, 2G RAM, Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher

From: download3k.com

Lee H.Badman, Wirednot, Dec. 28th, 2013

A few weeks back, I was invited by Colasoft to take a look at their Capsa 7 Enterpriseanalyzer. Having a little time off around the holidays, I finally got around to spending a couple of hours with the product. This hardly constitutes an in-depth review, but I can share some of the first impressions this interesting and powerful tool made on me during playtime.

I was vaguely familiar with Colasoft, having looked at some of their rather nifty freebies (like a multi-host ping tool) in the past. Wanting to get oriented before digging in, I popped in on the website to see what the promise of Capsa 7 Enterprise amounts to. Lifted from Colasoft’spages:

Key Features of Capsa Enterprise:

• Real-time packet capture as well as the ability to save data transmitted over local networks, including wired network and wireless network like802.11a/b/g/n;
• Identify and analyze more than 500 network protocols, as well as network applications based on the protocol analysis;
• Identify “Top Talkers” by monitoring network bandwidth and usage by capturing data packets transmitted over the network and providing summary and decoding information about these packets;
• Overview Dashboard allows you to view network statistics at a single glance, allowing for easy interpretation of network utilization data;
• Monitor and save Internet e-mail and instant messaging traffic, helping identify security and confidential data handling violations;
• Diagnose and pinpoint network problems in seconds by detecting and locating suspicious hosts;
• Ability to Map the traffic, IP address, and MAC of each host on the network, allowing for easy identification of each host and the traffic that passes through each;
• Visualize the entire network in an ellipse that shows the connections and traffic between each host.

It’s a pretty ambitious feature set, for a $995 price tag. (“Enterprise” differs from “Professional” in that Professional doesn’t do WLAN.) Capsa is only available for Windows (all versions), and this is a laptop analysis tool rather than a datacenter-racked super-sleuther. Also- WLAN support includes up to 802.11n, but not .11ac yet.

That’s the intro, but how does the product actually perform? I’ll admit to being impressed.

Though I know my way around plenty of CLIs, I’m a UI guy- I hate sucky, confusing, ill-laid out interfaces. Colasoft passes my muster in this regard- Capsa 7 packs a surprising amount of analysis info into a peppy and nicely designed dashboard. Having little Ethernet in my home these days and not wanting to get up off my duff to set up a wired test scenario (it’s the holiday break, after all) I aimed most of my tire-kicking at my home WLAN environment (currently a mix of Aerohive and Meraki). As with any analysis tool, you start by selecting your adapter, and in this case a WLAN channel and one or more SSIDs, and off you go- no AirPcap needed or any sort of special drivers (I tested it with a number of adapters, all did well).

You get variety of analysis profiles to pick from (Full, Traffic Monitoring, Security, HTTP, Email, DNS, FTP, Instant Messaging), and deep views into the gory details of 802.11/802.3 packets as you would with any competing tool. You also get just a nice range of different views that feel AirMagnet-y (or WildPackets-y) at times, but what you don’t get is any of the spectrum type channel plots that MetaGeek gives. Short of that, Capsa 7 is pretty comprehensive.

My “testing” amounted to generating a bunch of nothing-special network traffic both locally and across the Internet, and then drilling into it looking for anyplace I might want to go for analysis that Capsa fell short on. There just wasn’t any.

I am intrigued enough to play further, and my fully-functional eval copy will also get turned loose on my big WLAN when I get back to work to see how it does in the presence of an enterprise-grade 802.1x Wi-FI environment with a ridiculous order of magnitude more clients than I have at home. If there is anything good or bad to add, I’ll come back and amend this post.

Meanwhile, Colasoft does make Capsa 7 available for free 15-day trials.

If you’re in the market for a decent all-in-one wired/wireless analyzer, AND you don’t need 11ac support, AND you run Windows, you might want to have a look at Capsa 7 Enterprise.

http://www.networkcomputing.com/data-networking-management/10-free-network-analysis-tools/240163757?queryText=capsa

The article was written by Ericka Chickowski .She is an award-winning freelance writer, Ericka Chickowski specializes in coverage of information technology and business innovation. She has focused on information security for the better part of a decade and regularly writes about the security industry as a contributor to Dark Reading. Chickowski’s perspectives on business and technology have also appeared in dozens of trade and consumer magazines, includingChannel Insider, Consumers Digest,  Entrepreneur,  InformationWeek, Network Computing and SC Magazine.(Information from http://www.networkcomputing.com)

Ericka Chickowski  recommended 10 free network analysis tools in her article,the first one is Capsa Free.

This is how Ericka Chickowski describes Capsa Free.

“Capsa Free is an network analyzer designed for monitoring, troubleshooting and analysis, Capsa Freefrom Colasoft provides the capability to identify and monitor more than 300 different protocols. Users can record network profiles, create customizable reports and set customizable alarm trigger combinations. Additionally, Capsa offers MSN and Yahoo Messenger monitoring statistics, email monitoring and auto-saving of email content and an easy-to-use TCP timing sequence chart.” (Actually Capsa can  identify and monitor more than 400 different protocols now.)

Thanks Ericka, Thanks all the people who like Capsa.

Tulsa, OK – November 11, 2013 – Colasoft LLC, an innovative developer of network management and packet analysis software and solutions, today announced the release of a new version of its flagship product, nChronos, a Forensic Network Analysis Application. Customizable and schedulable reporting are now available in nChronos 4.1, allowing network administrators to easily generate and schedule various reports on the traffic for a specific time period.

nChronos’ new reporting engine now provides 12 statistical system reports based on:

1)       Traffic

2)       Addresses

3)       Communication

4)       Applications

5)       Top Talkers

6)       Alarms

Users can customize reports for a specific network scope, like addresses, network segments, and applications, based on 17 built-in report modules. Network Administrators will have comparison data for all reports. nChronos 4.1 allows more effective analysis because not the data from all reports can be compared with historical indicators. Both system reports and user-defined reports can be scheduled to generate hourly, daily, weekly and monthly reports, and sent to any email recipients as specified.

nChronos 4.1 strives to provide greater convenience for network administrators through the reports delivered by email.  This new reporting includes, but is not limited to:

1)       Bandwidth Consumption

2)       Application Activity

3)       Trending Traffic

4)       Network Anomalies

With the new innovative comparison function, the nChronos reports can be presented to the management without any extra effort because everything is already so designed for you.

In addition to reports, traffic alarms based on network segments are provided in nChronos 4.1, with 27 available trigger parameters. A Transaction Content Analysis window is provided for transaction logs to display the details of an application transaction, including the client and server IP and port number, the request and response time and content.

The reporting and transaction analysis are great features we have added to nChronos because of customer demand”, said Brandon Lewis, Director of Customer Support at Colasoft, “This new release makes nChronos a more comprehensive forensic network analysis solution for critical enterprise networks”.

The evaluation version of nChronos 4.1 is now available at Colasoft website www.colasoft.com.

Read the full press release here.

We are very happy today to announce a new version of our flagship product, the nChronos Network Forensic Data Recorder application. The new nChronos version 4.0 has enhanced application monitoring and alerting capability.

This release of nChronos provides the user with the capability of monitoring the performance and real-time availability of custom applications.  nChronos has also added the ability to monitor transaction analysis of HTTP-based web applications.  nChronos has the ability to monitor Standard Applications, Web Applications, and Signature Applications.

The nChronos Expert Analyzer module now offers the ability to perform Custom Reporting of network parameters. Additionally, in response to customer demands and industry trends nChronos now supports IPv6 analysis.  The nChronos is fully supported on Microsoft Operating Systems running in 64 bit OS’s.

“Application monitoring and alerting are mission critical to many of our customers”, said Brandon Lewis, Director of Customer Support at Colasoft. “This new release of nChronos provides users the capability to ‘rewind’ their network traffic and troubleshoot application issues as if it were real-time.”

nChronos 4.0 now gives network engineers the ability to monitor from the application to the packet level and set alarms that trigger when network performance parameters are exceeded or security conditions are tripped.  nChronos performs like a Digital Video Recorder for your Data Network now alerting you of an issue before your phone rings.

A Free Evaluation version of nChronos 4.0 is now available at Colasoft website www.colasoft.com.

Capsa Network Anlayzer 7.6 is newly released! You are welcomed to try all the new features and improvements. The free trail is avaliable for download at Colasoft website.

New features and improvements in Capsa network analyzer 7.6:

Unique Analysis Task Scheduler Used to Preset Time for Analysis Projects;
Global Configurations Can Be Exported & Imported;
Display Filters Are Provided for Isolating & Viewing Particular Items;
Report with User-defined Name & Optional Statistic Items is Available;
Logs can be automatically saved in *.csv format.
Capsa can now identify encryption type of AP automatically.
An MAC address column is added to the Log tab.
Settings for analysis profile have been optimized.
Local engine settings are merged into Options on the Menu button.
Capsa can now decode Tunnel IP in IP protocol.
Analysis profiles, such as Traffic Monitor, Protocol Analysis and IM Analysis have been

Read the detailed descriptions about the new features here. For more information, please visit www.colasoft.com.

As the big holiday Thanksgiving is coming very soon, Colasoft are wishing all of our customers and software users a great Thanksgiving! It’s time to sharing and spreading happiness, to celebrate this great holiday, we are preparing a big sale to offer you the most cost-effective software. It is coming very soon and up to 40% discount for both Capsa network analyzer and Colasoft nChronos will be available.

Free trail of Capsa network analyzer and nChronos is available for download at our website www.colasoft.com.