Easy-to-use tool to monitor incoming network traffic [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate:
Monitor all and any internet traffic from my home PC - what should I use?

On my Windows XP computer, I sometimes see the task bar network icon light up indicating that a bunch of information is coming in or out of my computer. Just now it happened, and was apparently a Firefox update (at least, Firefox wanted to update itself soon after the activity died down).

How can I conveniently tell right away what all the network activity is? I'm aware of Wireshark, but it's a little more low-level than I'm interested in for this purpose. (Or maybe I just don't know how to use wireshark well enough.) I'm hoping there's some tool that will figure out which address the bulk of the packets are coming from, and do a reverse DNS lookup to tell (if possible) what the source is.

Solution 1:

TCPView from SysInternals (now Microsoft) is pretty simple, and free.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897437.aspx

Shows you the processes and the connections they are making (and yes, doing reverse DNS).

It's basically a graphical live version of netstat (which is another option, and built into Windows. Just type 'netstat' in a command prompt).

Solution 2:

I have used a lot of network monitor indeed, for free under windows, your options are wireshark, Netmon. Microsoft network monitor is easy to use. You can monitor the traffic in real time and resolve the DNS.

For commercial, I prefer Capsa, because sniffer and omnipeek is too expensive for a small company.