Android emulator: How to monitor network traffic?

How do I monitor network traffic sent and received from my android emulator?

Solution 1:

There are two ways to capture network traffic directly from an Android emulator:

Copy and run an ARM-compatible tcpdump binary on the emulator, writing output to the SD card, perhaps (e.g. tcpdump -s0 -w /sdcard/emulator.cap).
Run emulator -tcpdump emulator.cap -avd my_avd to write all the emulator's traffic to a local file on your PC

In both cases you can then analyse the pcap file with tcpdump or Wireshark as normal.

Solution 2:

It is also possible to use http proxy to monitor http requests from emulator. You can pass -http-proxy flag when starting a new emulator to set proxy (Example burp) to monitor Android traffic. Example usage ./emulator -http-proxy localhost:8080 -avd android2.2. Note that in my example I'm using Burp, and it is listening port 8080. More info can be found here.

Solution 3:

For OS X you can use Charles, it's simple and easy to use.

For more information, please have a look at Android Emulator and Charles Proxy blog post.

Solution 4:

Yes, wireshark will work.

I don't think there is any easy way to filter out solely emulator traffic, since it is coming from the same src IP.

Perhaps the best way would be to set up a very bare VMware environment and only run the emulator in there, at least that way there wouldn't be too much background traffic.

Solution 5:

A current release of Android Studio did not correctly apply the -tcpdump argument. I was still able to capture a dump by passing the related parameter to qemu as follows:

tools/emulator -engine classic -tcpdump dump.cap -avd myAvd