Today’s networks support a lot of traffic data, especially with the adoption of embedded systems. Furthermore, the complexity of the data passing through networks has significantly increased. Yet system administrators have to manage and secure these networks effectively. A network protocol analyzer is an essential component of network security and management that every administrator needs. It detects unusual traffic levels and packet characteristics and helps prevent harmful traffic from entering an IT environment.
Why Should You Use a Network Protocol Analyzer?
Benefits of Using a Network Protocol Analyzer
Security Incident Investigation
6 Best Network Protocol Analyzers in 2023
1. SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (Free Trial)
2. ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer
Choosing the Right Protocol Analyzer
This post describes what a network protocol analyzer is, why it’s important, and its benefits. It also examines the six best network protocol analyzer tools currently available and their features to help you choose the one that fits your needs.
What Is a Protocol Analyzer?
A protocol analyzer is a system that monitors and interprets data packets and their contents as they’re transferred between different points of a network. A network protocol analyzer tool allows sysadmins to capture data, identify network issues, investigate security incidents, and optimize network performance.
Why Should You Use a Network Protocol Analyzer?
Network problems occasionally arise from hardware failure, misconfigurations, congestion, malware, etc. Thus, you need a tool to help you detect and troubleshoot network problems, identify traffic patterns, and plan network changes.
Benefits of Using a Network Protocol Analyzer
A network protocol analyzer is valuable to security teams in many ways. Let’s explore the benefits of this tool.
Network Troubleshooting
Protocol analyzer tools help examine captured packets to identify recurring errors, network performance issues, and misconfigurations. With a protocol analyzer, security teams can easily find the root causes of network issues and debug errors. Root causes may include congested links, misconfigured routers, faulty devices, etc.
Network Monitoring
Protocol analyzers enable SysAdmins to know the state of the network traffic and the number of bad frames and collisions in real time. They help detect the stations generating unusual levels of traffic. Moreover, they detect and flag suspicious instant messaging (IM) traffic for investigation and isolate unauthorized wireless access points.
Security Incident Investigation
Network protocols are used to manage network forensics and compliance. They detect and prevent malicious activity, unauthorized access, and data breaches. Besides, they can be configured to send alerts to the relevant teams when network security is under threat.
6 Best Network Protocol Analyzers in 2023
Below are the features of the six best network protocol analyzers available today.
1. SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA) (Free Trial)
SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA) monitors bandwidth usage and network utilization in real time. It provides a detailed network traffic analysis that helps detect malicious traffic and identify bandwidth hogs. It’s a module of SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM).
©2023 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All rights reserved.
Key features:
- It has a simple dashboard showing top applications in use to help you monitor traffic flow. In case of bandwidth issues, you can rate limit or filter non-critical business applications affecting network bandwidth.
- It uses flow-based monitoring and supports various flow data types from Cisco vendors such as Huawei NetStream, sFlow, IPFIX, Junos Traffic Vision (formerly Jflow), and NetFlow V5 and V9.
- It monitors and tracks bandwidth usage of your network’s IP address groups, applications, and protocols to identify top consumers.
- It supports application flow-based alerting and provides instant alerts when an unusual traffic change occurs.
- It allows the creation of performance analysis projects with PerfStack™ dashboards. This is important for root cause analysis, creating ad-hoc reports, and troubleshooting issues in real time.
- It offers traffic flow statistics that help manage CBQoS policies.
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2. ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer
NetFlow Analyzer collects NetFlow packets exported from enterprise switches and routers to generate network traffic reports.
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Key features:
- It allows sending of alerts and notifications when an unexpected activity in the network infrastructure arises and highlights the affected applications.
- It supports multiple vendors and protocols such as Cisco Network Based Application Recognition (NBAR2), Huawei NetStream, sFlow, IPFIX, Junos Traffic Vision, and NetFlow V5 and V9.
- It collects data from VMware and vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) to allow you to filter east-west traffic on specific hypervisors and avoid service interruptions when moving workloads.
- For enterprises relying on e-commerce Voice over IP (VoIP) and other critical applications, NetFlow Analyzer has a functionality that allows visualization of the performance of Quality of Service (QoS) policy to ensure a smooth flow of prioritized traffic.
3. WireShark
WireShark is an open-source protocol analyzer tool used to capture network packets and filter segments within packets.
Key features:
- WireShark captures network traffic and allows you to save captured packets for offline analysis.
- It can capture traffic from ethernet, Bluetooth, frame relay connections, wireless LAN, token ring, USB, ATM, PPP/HDLC, etc.
- It has a filter feature that enables you to filter logs and zero down your search to troubleshoot a particular network issue.
- WireShark runs on most Unix and Unix-like operating systems such as macOS, Linux, Microsoft Windows, Solaris, NetBSD, FreeBSD.
- It’s enriched with powerful display filter capabilities to allow you to focus on specific packets based on predefined criteria such as port numbers or protocol and source/destination IP addresses.
- WireShark provides TShark for users who like to work on the Linux command line.
4. PRTG Network Monitor
PRTG Network Monitor is an open-source network protocol analyzer that gives you an overview of traffic, applications, and systems in an IT infrastructure.
©2023 Paessler AG
Key features:
- It’s an agentless network monitoring solution, so you don’t need to install anything on your devices to start managing the network.
- It uses standard protocols such as ICMP, secure HTTPS, SNM, OPC UA, WMI, and more to gather network and bandwidth usage data from devices.
- It supports remote site monitoring with encrypted connections allowing secure distributed network monitoring. It allows network bandwidth analysis and bandwidth overload detection through flow protocols such as NetFlow, xFlow, Packet Sniffer, and SNMP.
- Its alert system sends notifications directly to your phone through email, push notifications, or HTTP.
- It has a flat-file proprietary database optimized for monitoring data, ensuring fast performance, ease of backup, and preventing network overload.
5. Omnipeek
Omnipeek is a protocol analyzer for network troubleshooting, analysis, and monitoring. Key features:
- Omnipeek allows administrators to troubleshoot enterprise networks locally.
- It also works as a software console for distributed Omnipeek Capture Engines. This allows administrators to capture data at any location across the network, analyze it, troubleshoot problems, and conduct statistical analysis remotely.
- It allows data collection from multiple network topographies, such as local matrix switches, VoIP, 802.11, and 1/10/40/100 Gigabit.
- Administrators can use VoIP analysis to troubleshoot VoIP traffic and videos. The analysis contains decode summaries for H.225, G.711, G.723, H.323, SIP, RTCP, and MGCP traffic.
6. Snort
Key features:
Snort is an open-source intrusion detection system. It’s easily deployable to most network nodes like servers, end nodes, and routers. A commercial version of this protocol analyzer tool is also available.
- It performs packet capture, analysis, and content searching on the packet in real time.
- It provides rule sets that sysadmins can use to configure the protocol analyzer to detect various intrusions.
- Sysadmins can download the available rule sets and install them to the protocol analyzer or install a rule manager such as Oinkmaster.
- As a packet sniffer, Snort monitors network traffic and scans packets for suspicious anomalies.
Choosing the Right Protocol Analyzer
The above tools are all capable protocol analyzers. Some have an edge over others when it comes to protocol support, capture rate, filtering capabilities, platform compatibility, real-time packet analysis, and more.
SolarWinds NTA ticks many boxes in the features you would expect from a protocol analyzer tool. In particular, it’s a robust real-time monitoring and alerting tool that supports various vendors. The combination of SolarWinds NTA and NPM gives sysadmins a holistic view of the network, making it easier to identify potential congestion points and performance-related problems and to troubleshoot issues in the network. You can also choose the robust Solarwinds Hybrid Cloud Observability offering containing all the features of NTA and NPM as well as other capabilities connected to network monitoring, database, and applications.
Final Thoughts
To efficiently manage and secure networks, you need a tool to help you analyze the traffic passing through the network. A network protocol analyzer is the right companion to help you identify malicious traffic issues that may affect network security and performance.
SolarWinds NTA is one of the best network protocol analyzers you can depend on today to solve network management issues.
This post was written by Caroline Wanjiru. Caroline is a software developer and a technical writer. In her work, she has developed interests and worked on many machine learning and artificial intelligence projects.
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