Today's useful utility is Wireshark, a free and very powerful network packet sniffer. It was probably about 5 years ago I needed a packet sniffer to analyze some network traffic at work. So I searched the Internet and downloaded about 10 packet sniffers. Some of these were totally free but many of them were limited trails of a full product. But most of these programs were difficult to use and/or didn't work very well. Only two programs caught my eye as worth using. One was Packet Monitor from AnalogX (previously discussed) and the other was Etherreal. Etherreal was by far the more powerful and capable program, Packet Monitor's main benefit was a very clean UI. Etherreal has since changed its name to Wireshark.
Wireshark has sort of become the defacto standard for packet sniffers. In the last two years multiple customers with issues have sent me packet traces of their issue, and these traces have always been from Wireshark. So if you've never used Wireshark you might want to download it now and play with it a little bit, you never know when you're going to be given a Wireshark file or asked to capture some activity using Wireshark.
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