How To Monitor A Home Computer Network

Home network monitoring can be useful if you want to analyze traffic patterns, or if you need to find out what type of data is being sent to and from different computers in your house to determine whether someone is spying on your network. Fortunately, monitoring a home computer network is easy to do, thanks to some free software called Microsoft Network Monitor, which captures network traffic on a network. By installing this on target computers, you can see what traffic is passing to and from them.

Things You'll Need

• Hardware hub
• Administrative access to the monitor computers
• Microsoft Network Monitor (Netmon.exe) software

Instructions

1. Connect the target computer and the monitor computer to a hardware hub, so that the monitor computer has the ability to see all of the traffic from the target computer.

2. Install Microsoft Network Monitor (Netmon.exe) onto the monitoring computer, following the on-screen prompts. When the installation has completed, start the program using the desktop icon that has been created.

3. From the Start Page tab, select which network adapter you wish to monitor (usually you will want to monitor the "Local Area Connection") and press the "New Capture" button, which opens a new tab.

4. On the New Capture tab, press the "Start" button near the top middle of the program to begin the traffic capture. As traffic over the network is tracked, it will be sorted on the left side of the screen, so you can see what the target computer and your monitoring computer is sending and receiving.

5. Once you see a process or program appear on the left column, that means that that program has sent or received data. Click on that program to view the traffic and data that was sent. Under the Frame Summary section, you can see which websites and IP addresses were accessed by the program, as well as what data was sent and received.

6. Click on the plus sign next to a program or process name to see a categorized list of different data transmissions that have occurred between computers.

7. Click the "Save As" button to save the traffic analysis in a file for later examination, or if you want to have a record of your monitoring activities.

Tips & Warnings

• The Microsoft Network Monitor works best on a wired network, not on a wireless network.

References

• How to use network monitor to capture network traffic
• Microsoft Network Monitor 3.3