Network monitoring tools can be used to monitor data transfers on your network. Monitoring is a process of capturing link frames in the network and storing these frames in memory. Monitoring also includes viewing the contents of the individual captured frames.
Network monitoring tools are mostly used by network administrators to look for network configuration errors or monitor network workload. These tools are also an indispensable resource for programmers who develop network applications. To give you an example, let’s say you have written a client/server application. You start the application and nothing happens—the client does not even connect to the server. At this point, you cannot be sure whether the problem lies with the client or the server. By capturing frames, however, you can establish that the client sent a data frame, but the server did not react and the fault is therefore likely on the server’s side. Or you...