This cab file could get rather large if you are taking a trace on a busy server. cab file containing other pieces of information you may not have wanted (such as event log exports, etc). One side note about using netsh, network traces from netsh also include a. Luckily, Microsoft has a conversion utility that can be downloaded from Github ( ). etl files that aren’t readable by Wireshark or other common utilities. Unfortunately, Microsoft had intended on people using Microsoft Message Analyzer to read the capture files, so they are. The netsh command works a little differently than tcpdump, as you start a trace and it runs in the background until you tell it to stop.

What most people don’t know, however, is that since Windows 7 / 2008 R2 network capture functionality was included in the netsh command. At that point, Microsoft replaced netmon with Microsoft Message Analyzer, which then got dropped in 2019. Windows used to have the netmon utility but it got dropped in 2010. Windows is a little more interesting Replacing Windows Message Analyzer & Netmon For Linux and macOS that utility has been tcpdump for quite a while. How can we do analysis without Wireshark? Fear not, Windows, Linux (at least most distributions), and macOS all come with utilities built in. On top of needing a capture, you may not want to install a third party capture tool like Wireshark but you want to be able to open the capture file in Wireshark for the analysis.

Maybe you’re troubleshooting a communication issue or maybe you’re doing something a little more suspect on a penetration test (looking for that clear text communication floating on the network to a host).

There are times when you need to capture some network traffic.

Windows wireshark filter dns traffic