Colasoft Blog

The latest released Capsa Network Analyzer 7.2 supports monitoring instant message activity, which not only gives us real time monitoring, but also auto-saving instant messages details to local disk. Whether a parent who has teenager kid, monitoring his teenager kids’ online activities like whom are they chatting with, what they are talking about are of great importance to make sure the kids are safe and will not be misled. Or a company policy requires taking some measures to guarantee the employees’ working efficiency, one of the measures is to find out who is chatting on MSN or Yahoo Messenger about some non-working stuffs. This article is to talk about how to monitor instant message activities with Capsa 7.2 as well as save the messages to local disk.

To monitor instant messages, we need first to enable the IM analysis modules in the analysis profiles, because none of them are enabled by double-clicking an analysis profile to change the profile settings.

If we’d like to create a new analysis profile only used to monitor IM messages. Right-click anywhere in this section, and choose New from the context menu and only enable the MSN and Yahoo analysis modules.

Then click Next and then OK to finish the settings. Now click the big run button to start a capture.

When the main program is initiated and we go to the Log tab which holds the IM monitor results. In this tab, we’ll see two IM logs, MSN log and Yahoo log, including the time, sender’s account and the receiver’s account.

Not only can Capsa monitor all IM activities in our network segment, but also save these records to a csv file. Click the Export icon, and give the file a name. We can open the csv file with Excel to make a deeper analysis.

Someone may ask what if we are not around, is Capsa able to auto save the messages down to a file? Sure it is. Click the Log Settings icon, and click the Save Log File button. A new dialog box appears. Check Save to disk. There are two ways to save logs: save to a Single File and save to Multiple Files. For example, we enter the prefix for their name. And then decide how to split logs, say we split by everyone day. If we just want to save the latest files, we should check this and enter a number, say 30. We can read that we save everyday’s messages into a file, and just keep the latest 30. We’ll get the messages of the past 30 days. Now, any message goes from or to your network will be logged into a log file.

This is how Capsa monitors instant message activity and auto-saving the content to local disk. Hope it helps. And we have a video tuterial at our official site.

June 22, 2010 – Colasoft, an innovative provider of all-in-one and easy-to-use network analyzer software, today announced the newest version 7.2.1 of its flagship product-Capsa network analyzer, which is the combination of powerful monitoring, alerting, and reporting capabilities. In this version, two long-awaited monitors are added in: IM monitor and Email monitor.

Emails are provided to employees as an efficient means of communication, along with this technological advancement are many collateral problems concerning enterprise information security, such as email worm thread, disclosure of trade secrets or other enterprises’ confidential information, etc. Capsa 7.2.1 provides you with powerful email monitoring. With the captured email file, you are accessible not only to basic email information such as client, server, sender name, time, etc, but also to the original content of the email. Capsa 7.2.1 supports auto-saving email content. All of the email information is captured and saved, which will serve as valuable electronic evidence when needed.

MSN (aka Live Messenger) and Yahoo Messenger are two of the most popular chat tools on internet, IM monitoring is a necessary and effective method for enterprises to ensure employees’ work efficiency. Capsa 7.2.1 gives a real-time instant message monitoring and recording. Capsa 7.2.1 is able to deliver the most accurate MSN and Yahoo messenger monitoring statistics which can be exported and saved for further analysis. To some extent, IM monitor helps enterprise achieve effective management as well as improve network and economic performance.

Besides IM and Email monitors, considering our users may have useful project files saved by version 6.9, Capsa 7.2.1 supports opening project file from Capsa 6.9.

Capsa 7.2.1 runs under Windows XP/2003/Vista/7. A trial version is available for download at the company’s website: http://www.colasoft.com/

About Capsa

Capsa is an easy-to-use Ethernet packet sniffer (network analyzer or network sniffer) for network monitoring and troubleshooting purposes. It performs real-time packet capturing, 24/7 network monitoring, reliable network forensics, advanced protocol analyzing, in-depth packet decoding, and automatic expert diagnosing. By giving you insights into all of your network’s operations, Capsa makes it easy to isolate and solve network problems, identify network bottleneck and bandwidth use, and detect network vulnerabilities.

About Colasoft

Ever since 2001, Colasoft has been an innovative provider of all-in-one and easy-to-use software solutions for users to monitor network activities, analyze network performance, enhance network security, and troubleshoot network problems. Currently, more than 5000 customers in over 80 countries trust the company’s flagship product, Capsa Packet Sniffer, as their network monitoring and troubleshooting solution. Featured customers include Alcatel, Airbus, Dell, Ericsson, IBM, Intel, and Pepsi. Learn more about Colasoft and its solutions, please visit http://www.colasoft.com/