Colasoft Capsa - A Powerful Yet Simple Tool
Pros
- Robust Application. Able to handle traffic that most businesses will throw at it.
- Easy to use. Easy to setup captures and filter down to specific traffic types.
- Relatively cheap for what it's able to accomplish.
Cons
- Needs options to scale to 10Gb/s networks. The cutoff for performance looks to be around 3Gb/sl
- Needs API access to trigger capturesl
- Needs Agents for remote capturesl
Return on Investment
- While the product doesn't detect malware, it has helped track down malware infected machines by using data from other applications to run filters to look for known traffic destinations for that malware. For me this is a huge ROI since malware can be the great unknown.
- Relatively cheap compared to the feature set.
Alternatives Considered
SteelCentral Packet
Other Software Used
Splunk, Aruba Networks Wireless