Capsa captures and cooks net comms

We have tested products from many countries, but today we have a first: a Windows network packet capture and protocol analyzer from China. Capsa Enterprise is made by Colasoft, and we are very impressed.

The core features of Capsa Enterprise provide real-time packet capture, in-depth protocol analysis, automatic network-event diagnosis and reporting. Beyond looking good, what makes this product stand out is the depth and range of the ways it analyzes captured network packets.

Capsa Enterprise monitoring sessions are set up as projects. A project consists of the adapters to be monitored, the filters used to restrict the endpoints and protocols that are tracked, the diagnosis analyzers (routines that watch for and analyze events that are not to specification) that are to be applied and other options.

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We have tested products from many countries, but today we have a first: a Windows network packet capture and protocol analyzer from China. Capsa Enterprise is made by Colasoft, and we are very impressed.

The core features of Capsa Enterprise provide real-time packet capture, in-depth protocol analysis, automatic network-event diagnosis and reporting. Beyond looking good, what makes this product stand out is the depth and range of the ways it analyzes captured network packets.

Capsa Enterprise monitoring sessions are set up as projects. A project consists of the adapters to be monitored, the filters used to restrict the endpoints and protocols that are tracked, the diagnosis analyzers (routines that watch for and analyze events that are not to specification) that are to be applied and other options.

You can specify how big Capsa's buffer should be and whether the buffer is used as a circular (ring) buffer or a linear buffer. The linear buffer simply stops capturing packets when the buffer is full, keeps the buffer and analyzes new packets that then are dropped, or it dumps the entire buffer, keeping the stats gathered up to that point, and starts refilling the buffer.

While packet capture is proceeding, you can examine the data from multiple viewpoints. The user interface is divided into a Project Explorer panel on the left and a reporting panel on the right.

In the Project Explorer, you can select the entire project or a project subset by protocol, by physical address and by IP address. Each of these groups is broken down further. For example, the protocol group has Ethernet II and Ethernet 802.2 subgroups, of which the former in turn has IP Address Resolution Protocol subgroups. The IP subgroup has TCP, Internet Group Management Protocol, User Datagram Protocol and Internet Control Messaging Protocol subgroups and so on.