If you’re wondering what’s going through your network card all day and you want to see it in real time, there are many tools, including Sniffnet, which is completely open source and allows you to monitor all of this.
Sniffnet is developed in Rust and works equally well on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Once the network adapter is selected, you’ll see real-time refreshed graphs showing the amount of packets and bytes transmitted per second.
You can then sort this by packet amount, byte amount, or connection freshness :-).
The packets will then be filtered by protocol (HTTP, DNS, HTTPS, DHCP, etc.) and you can choose the protocol you want to observe from the start of the application. However, you won’t see the contents of these packets as you would with Wireshark. Sniffnet simply allows you to make statistics, and you can even export a report in TXT format that contains all the following information:
- Source and destination IP addresses
- Source and destination ports
- Transported protocols
- Number of packets and bytes exchanged
- Initial and final timestamps of information exchange
If, like me, you can’t find the export button, it’s located in the bottom right corner, but to see it, you’ll need to maximize the window.
So, are you interested?
To get started, you need to install Rust as follows on macOS and Linux (for Windows, click here):
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | shThen open a new terminal, to reload your shell and enter the following command to install Sniffnet:
cargo install sniffnetThe beast will then install and allow you to see all of your network traffic at a glance.
I liked the “clear display” / “dark display” function, which is nothing more than a color inversion. Very clever (and not so ugly after all).
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