HOWTO: Take a Network Monitor (netmon) Trace
Yeah, it is not a rocket science and probably you may already know it. I am just too lazy to draft the same email whenever any customer ask me how to take a netmon trace. So today I decided that I will stop writing those emails any further. I will have a blog post and point them to here... so here you go.. but wait why you need a netmon trace ???
1) What is Network Monitor (aka Netmon)
1) Network Monitor or Netmon is a very helpful tool to collect the raw packets as they pass through your network/wireless adaptor. It can be used to diagnose the various network issue you may face, suppose you are sending an email to smtp server and it just throw some weird error message that you have never seen before and you are wondering what is happening behind the scene. once you hit the send the code is out of picture and network comes into play. there could be various network issue why the email could not be send. using netmon you can see the raw packets and decode them to see what data is actually being passed.
I am not going into much detail how to use netmon and what all applications can be decode but just how to install it and take a netmon trace without any filters, it will make a big log but it will capture everything good to be analysed by an network expert.
So here you go...
You need to install the Network Monitor on to the client machine.
Please go to the following URL and install the latest version of Network Monitor 3.1 , make sure you download the right version depending upon your machine’ architecture (64bit or 32bit)
Once installed you will see this following screen, click on to the “Create a new capture tab…” button
It will bring up the capture window in front of you and you need to click on start capturing button,
After then it will start capturing the packets and you can see the data coming in Frame Summary View, try to reproduce the error and once successfully done click on stop Capturing button
Once all done, go to File->Save As , zip it and mail to me, if I have requested :)