Colasoft Blog

Internet traffic is the flow of data around the Internet. It includes web traffic, which is the amount of that data that is related to the World Wide Web, along with the traffic from other major uses of the Internet, such as electronic mail and peer-to-peer networks.

In case we want to monitor internet traffic generated or is generating in LAN, here is a detailed process how we can monitor internet traffic with Colasoft Packet Sniffer – Capsa.

We must make sure the packet sniffer software is correctly implemented so we can capture all the traffic in LAN, if you don’t know how to do it, please make sure you read how to implement a packet sniffer.

First let’s launch a new project with Colasoft Packet Sniffer, then do some online activities, such as chatting, browsing a website, sending and receiving emails, downloading some files. All these activities will generate different kinds of internet traffic. We may keep the project running to continuously monitor internet traffic or stop the project to do some analysis.

To monitor internet traffic, we’d better first select the “Internet Addresses” in the “Explorer” on the left window:

Monitor Internet Traffic Screenshot1

We can see that all the internet addresses are listed by countries, to monitor internet traffic of a specific country, we just need click on it; If we want to monitor internet traffic of a specific IP address within one country, we need to expand the country node and select the IP address in it.

Also we can monitor internet traffic aggregated or internet traffic in real-time

Monitor Internet Traffic Screenshot2

To view what online activities have generated or are generating internet traffic, we need to use the “Protocols” Tab.

Monitor Internet Traffic Screenshot1

We can see there are protocols which separately stand for different internet activities:

HTTP – Website browsing
MSN – online chatting with Live Messenger
POP3 – Email
HTTPS – Website browsing via a secure link
QQ- online chatting with QQ
DNS – Domain Name System