Summary 

With the variety and amount of data that travels on today's networks, it's easy to understand why packet analysis using Wireshark should be in everyone's skill set. In this chapter, we took a brief look at how packet analysis began in the 1990s with the use of hardware sniffers. Fast forward to today, and we can see that packet analysis is used by nearly every device on the network to gather traffic, examine the contents, and then decide what action to take.

We learned how developers, network administrators, students, and security analysts can all benefit from using packet analysis. We examined the many places where we conduct packet analysis: on a LAN, on a host, and in the real world. In addition to this, we discovered how packet analysis has a variety of uses within today's networks, including troubleshooting, testing IoT devices, monitoring threats, and baselining. We can now appreciate how Wireshark is an exceptional open source software product that includes rich features and a variety of tools available to easily solve problems and analyze network traffic. 

In the next chapter, we'll examine the Wireshark interface and review the phases of packet analysis. We'll also review the built-in Command-Line Interface (CLI) tools, such as dumpcap and editcap. Additionally, because Wireshark can be resource-intensive, we will learn how tshark (or terminal-based Wireshark can provide a lightweight alternative to Wireshark.