How to Monitor Your Network and Internet Traffic with Sniffnet

If you are the type who likes to know what is going on with your computer in regard to traffic from the network or from the internet, then you may want to consider installing some network monitoring software on your PC.

The problem with network monitoring software is that it tends to be complex and if you are not a network administrator, it might give you more information than you need or will understand. Fortunately, there is a free monitoring application that should give you the information you need without confusing you at the same time. In this article, we will be showing you how to monitor your network and internet traffic with Sniffnet.

Sniffnet is a free network and internet monitoring app that you can download from their website here. At the end of the installation process, you will be prompted to download Npcap on your computer which is needed for Sniffnet to work properly. Npcap is a packet capture and network monitoring software for Windows. It is an improved version of WinPcap, offering better performance, security, and support for modern Windows operating systems.

Once you have Npcap installed, you can start the Sniffnet program and choose the network adapter you want to use for the monitoring process. You can also decide if you want to monitor IPv4, IPv6 traffic or both. You can also monitor TCP, UDP and ICMP traffic and disable any option you do not wish to see in the app. Once you have your selections made, click on the rocket icon to start the monitoring process.

You will then see the network traffic represented by a graph in the Traffic rate section. Incoming traffic will be represented in orange while outgoing traffic will be shown in blue.

The Network host section will show you computers on your network as well as IP addresses and websites that are sending traffic to your computer. It will use the same orange and blue color coding to differentiate between incoming and outgoing traffic. You can change the data representation from bytes to packets if you would rather see that type of data.

We will now start to download a 5GB ISO file from the Ubuntu Linux website. Now we can see the traffic rate increase quite a bit and is shown in orange since it is incoming traffic.

We can also see that the download is coming from pdx.edu and the amount of data that has been downloaded so far (1.8GB).

Sniffnet can be configured with favorites by going to the notifications settings and checking the box next to Notify me when new data are exchanged from my favorites. It will also play a sound when your favorites are sending or receiving traffic. You can enable this by clicking on the settings button at the upper right corner of the app.

To add a host as a favorite, simply click the star icon next to it in the hosts section. Then when traffic is exchanged from that host, you will hear the notification sound associated with it.

Now when you go to notifications, you will see that data has been exchanged from your favorite.

The Inspect tab is used to show specific information about the network traffic such as source addresses and ports, destination addresses and ports, protocols, services, bytes and packets. You can also filter on these fields as well as filter by favorites, domain name, count and autonomous system name.

If I enable the Only show favorites filter, you can see that the other hosts will not show in the list. You can also see that I am both receiving and sending network traffic.

As you can see, Sniffnet is fairly basic yet provides some very useful information to help you monitor your network and internet traffic.

If you are looking for a basic tool that can monitor devices on your network to make sure they are up, then check out the free Network Alarmer app.

For additional training resources, check out our online IT training courses.

Check out our extensive IT book series.