Depending on budget, the market you are in, and your expertise I would recommend either Ethereal/Wireshark (both the same) or Network General Sniffer Portable. Both you can put on a laptop and decode packets in real time, and both are very good. Sniffer Portable is not free as Wireshark is though, we pay well over $1K for our licenses.

The above are ideal for a market of home users. If you work in a corporate environment you would have to look at solutions that fit into the data centers. We do a lot of IDS/IPS and network monitoring so in our data centers we use 1ru 50 micron optical taps from a vendor known as NetOptics. We also use Gigamon Matrix switches that feed all captured data into a sniffer (Infinistream, Niksun, whatever.)

Like I said, it depends on your which market you are in, your budget, and your expertise.

But for just basic use for home customers Wireshark or Sniffer Portable outstanding.


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