I work on WiFi and I am a customer engineer. We use Wireshark to analyze the sniffer captures or tcpdumps. That's the purpose of the solution.
There are very handy filters available in Wireshark.
It’s free and doesn’t cost us anything to use.
The product is simple to implement.
It is a stable solution.
In my previous company, we had Omnipeek, and the UI was better than Wireshark. This product needs to improve the UI.
Generally, you can use Omnipeek to capture packets. You can also use Wireshark to capture packets. However, they need a compatible adapter. If we use Wireshark without a compatible adapter, we really don't go to capture packets using it. We already get captures from the field and from customers, and we just use it for analysis.
I would make maybe adding filters easy. There are some options that we can enable to look into the packet. For example, the default installation of Wireshark doesn't have much information. You can just get to see the packet number, the time's terms, the source address, the destination address, and some detailed information. If I want to see the RSSI, the channel number, the protocol information, or the data rate, I need to go and modify some of the configurations to add columns to display this information. I need to spend some time with it. Therefore, the Wireshark default installation could probably include some more crucial information. That would be a little helpful.
It's been a pretty long time since I started using the product. It’s been more than five years.
Wireshark in general is good. It is stable. We have used it on Windows. We have used it on Linux. We have used it on MacBook and it works pretty well on every platform.
The solution is scalable in the sense you can add it to however many laptops you need to. It's not like you have 500 people using the same Wireshark or using a common license. It is installed on everyone's PC and whoever wants to use it can. We are using the free version. Therefore, getting more people to put it on their PCs also doesn’t cost the company more.
In our company, about 150 people, or many a few more, are using the solution.
We’ve never had the need to reach out to technical support.
I used Omnipeek. The UI was better than Wireshark. However, it is quite expensive.
If somebody pays for Omnipeek that heavy price, they also prefer to get a compatible adapter or a compatible card that works with Omnipeek.
In this company, people just use the solution. However, there wasn’t a discount moment when management suggested it to everyone.
The initial setup was pretty easy. It was straightforward. We didn’t find it to be difficult.
It only takes a few minutes to get everything up and running.
The solution is free to use. We do not have to pay any licensing fees.
I’m a customer and end-user.
The solution is installed on my PC.
Wireshark is a pretty good tool if somebody wants to learn packet analysis or just plain, simple debugging of network issues at an L2 or L3 level. It is quite good for anybody, even a beginner. Anybody can use this tool and the installation is simple. The default installation should work quite well.
I’d rate the solution eight out of ten. If they could make the UI a little better and help us to get some more crucial information easily while providing some options to enable certain parameters based on the protocol, I’d give it a ten out of ten.