Scheduled Packet Capturing

(Pro Version)

Home > Advanced Features > Scheduled Packet Capturing

To start the scheduled or manual direct to disk packet capturing, click the New Packet Collector button , use the File > New Scheduled Collector command, or press Ctrl+D on the keyboard. This will open the Settings dialog for scheduled packet capturing.

Now open the Scheduled Packet Capture Settings page. You can toggle between manual and scheduled start of the packet capturing, set the target directory and file prefix for the created data files, and you can configure the schedule for capturing data.

You should first set the target directory to a meaningful path here, as the program may not have write access to the directory that was set as default.

After clicking OK in the Settings dialog, the Scheduled Capture View will open and display information about scheduled, running, and failed packet collectors. You can change the above settings later. Therefore open the Settings dialog again via the Collect > Capture Settings menu command. Changes to the schedule will take effect when the next collection is added to the schedule table, changes to the data content will be used by the next collection that is started.

Note: If you get a message that the data file could not be opened, you have probably used characters in the file prefix that are not valid for filenames, or you don't have write permission for the target directory. You need to close the scheduled capture view and create a new one, because currently a restart of a failed data collection is not possible.

Wait until the first file has been created (or close the view after a scheduled collection was started) and open it with the Network Analyzer. Now you can view the collected data in the Packet List View.

You can also use command line options to start collecting packets when the Network Analyzer is started. First you need to create a scheduled capture settings file. Therefore start a new scheduled collector as described above. When you have made your settings, do not click the OK button of the Settings dialog. Instead of closing the dialog, go to the Save and Load Filter Settings page, click the Export button, and save the settings in a file. Now you can use the option -c (collector) and the settings filename as command line options for the Network Analyzer program, e.g. MTNA -c "C:\mtna_data\MyCollector.mnset". This will start the configured collector on start-up of the Network Analyzer.

Please see Advanced Report Topics for more tips on using the command line.