Colasoft Blog

By Mike Williams

Colasoft Capsa 8 Free is a powerful tool for monitoring and analyzing network traffic, the free version of an enterprise package normally costing from $695.

The program has a vast and lengthy list of features, yet it’s also accessible to regular users. Just choosing an adapter and clicking “Start” gets you an attractive dashboard, with graphs showing network utilization, traffic, and top traffic by protocol and domain (keep in mind that Wi-Fi devices can’t be monitored in the free edition).

That’s just the start. Click the Summary tab and you’ll see the data behind the charts, the total numbers of IP and MAC addresses used in this session, the various protocols, DNS queries and responses, SMTP/ POP3/ IMAP 4 connections and a whole lot more.

Maybe you want to zoom in? Choosing one of the Conversation tabs — TCP, say — allows you to drill down, see which packets went to/from which addresses, the packet size, time sent, and more.

Colasoft Capsa 8 Free captures data packets, too, so you’re not restricted to summaries. Selecting any of these items displays the individual packets, and you can choose one, view any text it contains (maybe the password in a POP3 exchange, say). There’s even a detailed breakdown of the exchange, so for example you might view an IP packet to check its IP flags or TTL value.

This level of analysis isn’t just for a few internet standards, either. The program understands and can decode hundreds of protocols, and show you precisely what’s happening in every exchange.

Unsurprisingly, considering the full Enterprise version costs $995, the free build has a lot of restrictions. No monitoring of Wi-Fi devices, only one network adapter may be monitored, only one capture project can be run at a time, that’s limited to 4 hours maximum, only the first 10 private IP addresses will be analyzed, and so on.

Colasoft Capsa 8 Free has more than enough functionality left to make it interesting, though, for everyone from casual users to network experts. Give it a try.

from: http://betanews.com/2015/07/13/colasoft-capsa-free-is-a-comprehensive-network-analyzer/#comments

Today we are very happy to announce the release of nChronos Free, the industry’s first retrospective network analysis freeware and rapid continuous network traffic capturing and analysis solution which offers great capabilities in troubleshooting real-time networks and fastest drilling down to back-in-time network analysis to thousands of network professionals.

nChronos Free enables network administrators and professionals to realize high-speed massive network packet real-time capture and record, provides efficient data mining, in-depth network traffic analysis, drill down to isolate performance issues and troubleshooting high-priority and critical network issues. nChronos Free offers home offices or SMB who could not afford costly network analysis solutions the capability of remote data capturing, efficient network troubleshooting, application and device performance evaluation and optimization.

“The advanced capabilities of nChronos Free are very essential to enterprises or organizations whose networks are challenged by growing network traffic and performance expectations, said Roy Luo, CEO at Colasoft. “nChronos Free make it easy for network professionals to maintain a well-performed and productive network by quickly pinpointing critical network issues”.

“Network professionals are not only able to capture network traffic in real-time and display detailed statistics including protocols, network utilization, and so on, but also to view analysis results of any specific time duration, benchmark the network performance, and audit network user activities with forensics from the historical network traffic”, said Eddie Gao, CTO at Colasoft. “By continuously recording network traffic for back-in-time analysis, all critical network issues that threaten network performance and network security would be proactively resolved”.

Key Features of nChronos Free

Perform 7×24 real-time packet capturing to storage for application and network forensics analysis and back-in-time troubleshooting
Efficient drill-down for traffic data-mining and index for rapid data retrieval and application isolation
Provide detailed statistics of protocols, IP/TCP conversations, network utilization to baseline and visualized trends of network performance
Monitor critical events on any critical links with customizable alerts
In-depth network traffic analysis to optimize performance

nChronos retrospective network analysis freeware is available for download HERE .