This is useful for you to present findings to less-technical management. Wireshark comes with graphical tools to visualize the statistics. You can use it to read all OSI layers separately hence making troubleshooting very effective. Wireshark is network monitoring and analyzing tool. Of course, many of them are usefulness and the majority of the packets on your network are likely to be TCP, UDP, and ICMP. In fact, this software supports more than two thousand network protocols. Such a tool is often referred to as a network analyzer, network protocol analyzer or sniffer. Wireshark lets you analyze network traffic in real time, and is often the best tool for troubleshooting issues on your network. There is also a terminal-based (non-GUI) version called TShark.

Wireshark is cross-platform and it runs on Linux, MAC OS, BSD, Solaris, some other Unix-like operating systems, and also Microsoft Windows. This software, formerly known as Ethereal but the project was renamed Wireshark in May 2006 due to trademark issues. This software one of the best packet analyzers available today and is available for free, and it is open source.

Why use wireshark