Wireshark Revealed: Essential Skills for IT Professionals

Capture filters

This gives you the facility to capture what you want to capture—others will be discarded. Capturing packets is a processor-intensive task, and Wireshark will acquire a quite good amount of primary memory as well. So, sometimes, we will have to save the resources for other processes, which can be utilized to analyze packets, and in some cases, we would like to capture only that data which meets our expression—rest of it will be dropped.

Wireshark offers some interesting options to configure an interface, which will be capturing traffic that meets only a certain expression, and this is achievable through the Capture Options window, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 2.1: The Capture Options dialog

Here, points list various ...