The great new Network Monitor from Microsoft that I blogged about in Beta is now out for official release. If you have not yet downloaded and played with this, hit the link below. It's a vast improvement over the network monitor that shipped of old with the OS, but not quite up to Wireshark standards. I've been using it since beta and it's ability to flag packets based on originating program is very helpful.
Externally Network Monitor 3.2 is available on Microsoft.com. The link is: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=f4db40af-1e08-4a21-a26b-ec2f4dc4190d&DisplayLang=en.
So What's New in Network Monitor 3.2?
[] Process Tracking: Now you can identify rogue applications sending network data! View all the processes on your machine generating network traffic (process name and PID). Use the conversation tree to view frames associated with each process.
[] Capture engine re-architecture to improve capture rate in high-speed networks. Network Monitor 3.2 drops significantly fewer frames that Network Monitor 3.1.
[] Find conversations: You asked for this. Many of our users found conversation tracking to be difficult to use as the view grew hard to manage, and it was difficult to correlate the frames they were seeing with the conversation nodes in the tree. Now, you can quickly isolate frames in the same network conversation. Just right-click on a frame and select a conversation to track, and you will see all the frames in that conversation. View TCP streams, HTTP flows etc.
[] Extensive parser set: Parsers for over 300 protocols! As before, the parsers are fully customizable.
[] Better parser management: By default only a subset of parsers are loaded. You can load the full parser set by going to ToolsOptionsParser and choose Full vs. Stub implementations.
[] CodePlex Ready: In the upcoming months, we plan to place all our Windows parsers on the Microsoft open-source CodePlex site and allow the community to modify and contribute parsers. You can find out more information on this here. This version of Network Monitor seamlessly integrates new parser packages.
[] Network Monitor API: Create your own applications that capture, parse and analyze network traffic!
[] More extensive documentation of the API and NPL. Access the documentation from Help NPL and API Documentation.
[] IA64 builds.
[] PCAP capture file support*.
[] ContainsBin Plug-in: Search frames for arbitrary byte sequences or strings.
[] and more. See our Release Notes in the Help directory of the installation folder for a complete list of new features and known issues.