The control what is seen from an EXISTING packet capture, but does not influence WHAT traffic is actually captured.

The other type of filter I will discuss is the display filter. Depending on the network, this could be a substantial amount of traffic! Then I don’t have to look at all the other traffic happening on the machine I am using to run Wireshark. Let see what happens when I apply this filter and then ping 8.8.8.8:Īs you can see, my capture ONLY includes traffic from or to the specified IP address. It watches for traffic containing the IP address of the machine on which I created this blog, which is 10.1.10.129. Selections and editing appearance is shown in figure 3:Īs an example, I have created a filter called My machine. You can also edit the existing Capture Filter choices when clicking that button. Or you can select the Capture Filter button and choose from the precompiled list. If you already know your filter topic, you can just type in the area noted by the red box. Once you click that, you will see (with some of the window omitted) what is shown in figure 2: It is easily accessed by clicking the icon at the top left of the main window. The type of filter controls what type of traffic is captured, and disregards all non-matching traffic. The first type of filter we will discuss is the capture filter. I just want to show the difference in a more visual way, ‘cause some people learn better that way! For my screenshots, I will be using what is (at the time of this writing) the latest version, which is 1.12.3. Today I will discuss two ways to filter in Wireshark: display filter and capture filter.ĭon’t get me wrong – Wireshark is well documented. When running a full-bore packet capture session, you may find that data are accumulating quite rapidly and likely you are obtaining much more than you want to look at. Since we don’t live in a perfect world, I wanted to demonstrate a little piece of the freely downloadable network packet sniffer called Wireshark.

In a perfect world, there would be no need to monitor network traffic looking for interlopers.

Wireshark https display filter