Reasons To Choose Packet Sniffing
Reasons To Choose Packet Sniffing
Packet Sniffing comes into consideration if your network device(s) do not support SNMP or if you need the differentiation of the bandwidth usage by network protocol and/or IP addresses.
Please keep in mind that the packet sniffer can only access and inspect data packets that flow through the network interfaces of the machine running PRTG.
This is fine if you only want to monitor the traffic of this machine (e.g. your web server). But in switched networks only the traffic for a specific machine is send to the machine’s network card, so PRTG can not see the traffic of other machines in the network.
If you also want to monitor the traffic of other devices in your network you must use a switch that offers a “monitoring port” or “port mirroring” configuration. In this case the switch sends a copy of all data packets traveling through the switch to the monitoring port. As soon as you connect the machine running PRTG to this port the packet sniffer is able to analyze the complete traffic in your network.
Another option is to use the PC running PRTG Traffic Grapher as a gateway for all the other computers.