Network Monitor 3.2 has arrived!

I’m so excited about this release I had to commandeer Paul’s blog for the day and write about it. My name is Tawanda Sibanda and I am the lead program manager for Network Monitor. The team put a lot of effort into this version, adding many of the requests we heard from our customers, while simultaneously fixing bugs and stabilizing the product. We hope you enjoy this release! Please feel free to leave feedback on Paul’s blog or participate in our Network Monitor survey

Now, let’s deep dive into some of the details of Network Monitor 3.2

Where are the bits?

Network Monitor 3.2 is available on Microsoft.com. The link is: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=103158&clcid=0x409

Network Monitor 3.2 will also be offered as an optional feature package in the next few weeks via Microsoft Update if you have a previous version of Network Monitor 3.x installed. To check for updates, click on Help>Check for Updates from the product menu (versions 3.1 and higher) or visit the site http://update.microsoft.com/Microsoftupdate.

So What’s New in Network Monitor 3.2?

• Process Tracking: Now you can identify rogue applications sending network data! View all the processes on your machine generating network traffic (process name and PID).  Use the conversation tree to view frames associated with each process.

• Capture engine re-architecture to improve capture rate in high-speed networks.   Network Monitor 3.2 drops significantly fewer frames that Network Monitor 3.1.
• Find conversations:  You asked for this. Many of our users found conversation tracking to be difficult to use as the view grew hard to manage, and it was difficult to correlate the frames they were seeing with the conversation nodes in the tree. Now, you can quickly isolate frames in the same network conversation.  Just right-click on a frame and select a conversation to track, and you will see all the frames in that conversation. View TCP streams, HTTP flows etc.

• Extensive parser set:  Parsers for over 300 protocols!  As before, the parsers are fully customizable.
• Better parser management:  By default only a subset of parsers are loaded.  You can load the full parser set by going to Tools>Options>Parser and choose Full vs. Stub implementations.
• CodePlex Ready:  In the upcoming months, we plan to place all our Windows parsers on the Microsoft open-source CodePlex site and allow the community to modify and contribute parsers.  You can find out more information on this here. This version of Network Monitor seamlessly integrates new parser packages.
• Network Monitor API: Create your own applications that capture, parse and analyze network traffic!
• More extensive documentation of the API and NPL.  Access the documentation from Help > NPL and API Documentation.
• IA64 builds.
• PCAP capture file support*.
• ContainsBin Plug-in:  Search frames for arbitrary byte sequences or strings.
• … and more.  See our Release Notes in the Help directory of the installation folder for a complete list of new features and known issues.

Enjoy!

*This feature includes software developed by the University of California, Berkeley and its contributors.
  This feature includes software developed by the Kungliga Tekniska Hogskolan and its contributors.
  This feature includes software developed by Yen Yen Lim and North Dakota State University.