Tcpdump cheat sheet with examples

Get started using tcpdump for network troubleshooting and monitoring with this comprehensive cheat sheet, which demonstrates different types of packet capture scenarios using actual tcpdump examples.

When it comes to network troubleshooting and monitoring, what types of tools you are using make a world of difference. While required tools may vary depending on the types of network problems you are dealing with, there are a set of essential tools that every network administrator must be familiar with, and tcpdump is definitely one of them.

tcpdump is a command-line tool packet sniffing that allows you to capture network packets based on packet filtering rules, interpret captured packet content, and display the result in a human-readable format. The main power of tcpdump comes from its (1) flexible packet filtering rules and (2) versatile protocol dissection capability. Although GUI-based Wireshark provides equally powerful filtering/dissecting capabilities via a more user-friendly interface, its relatively high memory footprint (for buffering packets) and GUI-based operations make Wireshark unsuitable when you are troubleshooting directly from remote headless servers.