In this blog post, I want to provide you with instructions on capturing simultaneous network traffic captures from a client system and from the web server. The captures will assist you in debugging networking related problems.

Download Microsoft Network Monitor (Current version 3.2) : download

Instructions for capturing network traffic with network monitor

Note: The tool must be installed on server side and client side to capture simultaneous tracing.

  • Open Network Monitor
  • Click on Create a new capture tab.
  • In the Select Networks window, ensure that the "Local Area Connection" or the correct network adapter is selected with a check mark.
  • Click on Capture menu and then select Start.
  • Reproduce the problem.
  • Click on Capture menu and then select Stop.
  • Click on File menu, Save As.. and then save the file.

If you have to send this data to a support team or a colleague for analysis, then name the server side capture file as "Server.cap" and client side capture as "Client.Cap" for easy identification and also include the following information:

  • IP addresses of the server and client.
  • The URL being browsed.

If you have never analyzed network traces and would like to try it, you are very welcome to follow my blog posts where I discuss issues related to HTTP traffic and how we went about resolving the problem.