Lex Thomas is a Principal Technical Account Manager for the US Premier Support Services Team at Microsoft. He also provides Network Monitor training for premier accounts where he teaches the basics of network troubleshooting. In this three part video...

We recently released a set of Microsoft Protocol Test Suites . OK it was a month ago, but we’ve been really busy…really! To access them you must have a Live ID and sign up. These Test Suites allow you to evaluate whether a protocol implementation meets...

Michael A. Hawker is the Program Manager for Network Monitor. His focus has been on the API, UI, and Experts as they have been developed through versions 3.3 and 3.4. You’ve seen a lot of updates lately on Experts with the move to the Outercurve Foundation...

We have some great new updates for the Top Users expert ! But this time, I had nothing to do with it… Bob Sledge contacted me about extending and fixing the Top Users Expert. And so with these updates, we now have an improved Expert for Network Monitor...

When I first wrote about NMDecrypt Expert in this blog I mentioned some limitations. There have also been bugs reported since then. I decided I would fix some of these problems and address some of the limitations. My hope is to make this tool even more...

We are excited to announce that we have moved 3 Network Monitor Expert projects and the Network Monitor SDK to the Outercurve Foundation . You can now contribute to: NMDecrypt – Decrypts SSL data, given the private key. NMTopUsers – Displays the top talkers...

Smart Potato is an application that allows you to access and manage your Media Center recordings and stream recorded TV. But when I first attempted to test this out on my phone, it complained that it could not reach the server. Detailed below is how I...

There are situations when you want to narrow a trace down to a certain time frame. However, creating a filter for a timestamp is not very straight forward. We will discuss how timestamps operate and ways to make filtering on timestamps workable. How Time...

You folks have been asking for updated videos about filtering and now I’ve made two more available. These include information about filtering with properties to understand how to access TCP and SMB values that don’t appear directly on the wire. We talk...

By using our latest 3.4.2455 release of the parsers and using a simple filter, you can now view reassembled traffic more easily for certain protocols. Normally when you reassemble a trace you see all the original frames plus the newly inserted reassembled...

Marking frames is a convenient way to temporarily flag a location in the trace you wish to keep track of during a troubleshooting session. But there is no built in way to mark frames in Network Monitor 3.4. However, using frame comments , coloring rules...

If you encounter a situation where Network Monitor freezes while opening a capture file, try updating to the latest parsers from the CodePlex Parser Site . A parser issue with SMTP traffic causes the engine to get in a state where we get stuck in a loop...

With the Network Monitor API you can access any field by adding its path and then accessing the offset, size or value using one of the Field Value Functions like NmGetFiledOffsetAndSize or NmGetFieldValueString. But for certain paths this does not work...

There are certain scenarios where the High Performance Filtering feature added in Netmon 3.4 will provide the best performance for capturing with a filter. The idea is to filter frames before they hit the disk which can improve your performance by reducing...

By Jin Feng Differentiating client requests and server responses can provide a clear-cut view and make it easier to understand what’s going on within a trace. Normally, with a flat trace this can be hard to determine and distinguish one packet from another...

We’ve redesigned the Network Monitor Blog in order to make it easier to find resources that have accumulated over the years. The FAQ on the TechNet wiki is a user editable resource, so feel free to extend it to include any frequently asked questions other...

I’m proud to announce the release of Network Monitor 3.4 to the Microsoft Download center . We’ve included a bunch of new exciting features and updates. A new high performance capturing feature allows you to capture on faster networks without...

by Darren J. Fisher – Network Monitor Development Lead Capturing network traffic is actually a very stressful task for most computers. With modern networks, traffic can arrive to a system at astounding rates. Most machines built these days have...

Parser Profiles are a new feature available in our 3.4 Beta . Rich parsers provide detailed information about every part of packet. However this detail comes with a price as it takes longer to parse and filter frames. Parser Profiles are designed to help...

We are extremely excited to announce that the Network Monitor 3.4 Beta has released on Connect . If you haven't done so already, please sign-up (for free) and help us test the new version while exploring it. There are some great new features, UI enhancements...

A new set of parsers for decoding office protocols is now available on the download center . These parsers represent the protocols described by the documents in the MSDN Open Specifications for Office . Simply download and run the parser package for your...

The Network Monitor Parser project is now part of the Systems Infrastructure & Integration Gallery of the CodePlex Foundation .  The CodePlex Foundation will now be responsible for further development and is using the new BSD license , which...

One of the most popular requests we've had is to provide a way to view encrypted traffic. The new Decryption expert aims to solve this problem for TLS/SSL traffic. Using the Decryption Expert The purpose of encrypting data in the first place is to hide...

It's often useful to understand how long it takes for a request to get responded to. This helps you gauge how well a client or server is keeping up. This type of measurement can also be done at different layers; however there are some tricks you'll have...

Microsoft publishes protocol documentation on MSDN that is intended to make it easier for others to develop interoperable implementations. “System Documents” provide overviews of system behavior for key systems such as Active Directory, File Sharing and...