Traffic overview

After having configured the options discussed in the previous section, everything is now ready to start monitoring your Internet traffic 🕵️‍♂️

As soon as your machine exchanges any network data, you'll be able to see several real-time statistics in the Overview page of the app.
As the name suggests, this page provides a high-level overview of your traffic in the form of an insightful dashboard of your Internet activity.

The most prominent section of the page is a live chart depicting the traffic rate relative to the latest 30 seconds of analysis:

• the upper part of the chart represents incoming data intensity, or in other words, the amount of data your machine is receiving from the network every second
• in a similar way, the bottom part of the chart reports outgoing data intensity, that is the traffic your machine is sending to other hosts

The chart is updated once per second to always display the most recent activity, reporting on the horizontal axis the number of seconds elapsed since the start of the monitoring session.

Moving away from the chart, we notice that the top left portion of the page includes a section providing other useful information — let's examine it a little deeper.

Starting from the top left, we can find details about the network adapter monitored: this is the same device previously selected for inspection in the initial page of the application.
In addition to the name of the device, it's reported its link type, that defines the kind of link-layer protocol used by the adapter.

Note

As of today, the most common link type is Ethernet, a technology widely adopted both by local and wide area networks.
In addition to Ethernet, Sniffnet supports monitoring network adapters based on raw IPv4, raw IPv6, and Null/Loopback.
Other link types are currently unsupported, but this shouldn't be a problem for the vast majority of use cases.

This section also features two handy buttons that enable to quickly change the unit of data displayed in the whole Overview page.
By default, the gathered data is represented in bytes, but if you prefer you can switch the unit of representation to network packets.

Finally, in this portion of the page are reported some other general attributes about the ongoing analysis:

• active filters: indicate whether filters were previously configured for this capture; if affirmative, an ℹ️ icon will be present and hovering over it will show more details about the filter value
• filtered bytes: the total number of bytes filtered according to the specified filters
• filtered packets: the total number of network packets filtered according to the specified filters
• dropped packets: number of packets lost because they weren't processed fast enough — such a value should be as low as possible

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The bottom section of the Overview page includes further insights about network hosts and services, which will be discussed in the next dedicated sections.