tool for monitoring network traffic on Windows 7 Home

Question

for Windows 7 Home Edition: can anyone recommend a tool to monitor network traffic? either build-in or 3rd-party. I like to have a graph view (e.g. as in Task Manager) but also nice are tool that lets me see what IP/port that's incoming/outgoing. Command line is fine. Or even some tutorial. Thanks.

(am old unix sys admin and web app dev. Though not much of a network admin and don't know much Windows. I need this tool just for my home PC, not in any pro capacity.)

Answer 1

Do you just want an overview of traffic or are you after something that can sniff the traffic? Any specific reason that you have in mind? The more specific you can be the better the suggestions you get are likely to be.

As a start I'd suggest taking a look at the Windows 7 resource monitor. Avaiable by clicking the "Resource monitor" button on the performance tab of task manager. This can list all the processes that are actively using the network.

If you want to see a list of open and listening connections then the command line tool netstat might be worth looking at.

Answer 2

PRTG

Answer 3

There are many options and what you want to accomplish is the biggest factor in differentiating them. On one hand the Windows Task Manager will give you some high-level traffic info..

Then you can dive in to things like perfmon or wireshark to get much high levels of detail. Not to mention PRTG (apparently) and others..

What are your objectives with this?