Wireshark Fundamentals: A Network Engineer's Handbook to Analyzing Network Traffic

Understand the fundamentals of the Wireshark tool that is key for network engineers and network security analysts. This book explains how the Wireshark tool can be used to analyze network traffic and teaches you network protocols and features.

Author Vinit Jain walks you through the use of Wireshark to analyze network traffic by expanding each section of a header and examining its value. Performing packet capture and analyzing network traffic can be a complex, time-consuming, and tedious task. With the help of this book, you will use the Wireshark tool to its full potential. You will be able to build a strong foundation and know how Layer 2, 3, and 4 traffic behave, how various routing protocols and the Overlay Protocol function, and you will become familiar with their packet structure.

Troubleshooting engineers will learn how to analyze traffic and identify issues in the network related to packet loss, bursty traffic, voice quality issues, etc. The book will help you understand the challenges faced in any network environment and how packet capture tools can be used to identify and isolate those issues.

This hands-on guide teaches you how to perform various lab tasks. By the end of the book, you will have in-depth knowledge of the Wireshark tool and its features, including filtering and traffic analysis through graphs. You will know how to analyze traffic, find patterns of offending traffic, and secure your network.

What You Will Learn

• Understand the architecture of Wireshark on different operating systems
• Analyze Layer 2 and 3 traffic frames
• Analyze routing protocol traffic
• Troubleshoot using Wireshark Graphs

About the Author

Vinit Jain, CCIE No. 22854 (R&S, SP, Security & DC), is a Sr. Technical Leader for Network Engineering at Cisco focusing on architecting network infrastructure for edge computing solutions. Prior to that, he worked as a Network Development Engineer at Amazon as part of Amazon’s backbone network operations team and as a technical leader at Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC), providing escalation support in enterprise, service provider, and data center technologies.

Vinit is a speaker at various networking forums, including Cisco Live events, NANOG, and CHINOG. He has co-authored several Cisco Press books and video courses with Cisco Press. Vinit holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Mathematics from Delhi University and also holds a Master of Science in Information Technology. Apart from CCIE, he also holds multiple certifications in programming, database, and system administration and is also a Certified Ethical Hacker. Vinit can be found on twitter @vinugenie.