OmniPeek Personal takes on Wireshark

Visual appeal

The OmniPeek Personal GUI is well designed, being graphically rich without detracting from the core functionality of displaying of packet stream data. Graphics are displayed in real time, enable the viewing of packet stream based analytics by conversation pair while instantly locating network events such as SQL queries and DoS attacks, for example.

The inclusion of both Visual Expert and Packet Visualizer toolsets with a free product shows that WildPackets is serious in providing a worthy alternative to Wireshark.

The Visual Expert sets the graphical trend for OmniPeek Personal, with its packet visualisation and graphing functionality

While not being an open source product itself, OmniPeek Personal does compete at the developer community level by providing an open API and SDK to enable custom plug-in creation and so extend functionality. The number of available plug-in is very limited in number and real world usefulness; a SQLFilter being the most practical, enabling the indexing of individual packet files as well as live captures against which simple and complex queries can be made without opening the original trace files again.

A remote TCPDump adapter runs tcpdump over a SSH connection to a Unix/Linux box and then streams the packets back into OmniPeek, while the Google Maps Plug-in rather pointlessly provides an eye candy approach to the display of source and destination IP address locations.