In fact, it will just hide the traffic that doesn’t match but never delete it. This will affect what you see on the screen, but not what you capture. You can even apply it while the capture is running. You can apply that to a capture you already made, then cancel the filter and apply another. You can’t even retrieve them later on, you just don’t see this traffic.Ī display filter is exactly what the name says. Instead, keep in mind that traffic that doesn’t match won’t be visible. As you can see, this is very useful if you want to see some specific traffic, but you are working in a production network where a lot of traffic is flowing. All the traffic that doesn’t match will be discarded, and never stored on your PC. Then, when launching the capture, Wireshark will capture only the traffic matching the filter. If you want to create a capture filter, you have to do it before starting the capture. They have the exact same syntax, what changes is the way they are applied. Wireshark supports two types of filters: capture filter and display filter. Don’t worry, we are going to crack it down. Instead, we will have to use a very specific syntax with some strict rules. As you can imagine, Wireshark doesn’t allow us to write such friendly sentences. It is something that looks like “I want to see only HTTP traffic” or “I’d like to see only traffic to and from host X”. Wireshark Filter, a quick introduction What is a Wireshark Filter?Īll in all, a Wireshark Filter is just a piece of text. You will find some very useful Wireshark Filter ready to use, copy-and-paste. If that’s what you want, just scroll down to the end of the article. In this article, we will learn how to create and apply an effective Wireshark filter in our captures. These Wireshark filters tell the software what we want to see, hiding everything else. This can quickly become messy unless we use a Wireshark Filter.

Therefore, you will have to deal with tons of information, particularly in a production network. However, as we have seen in the previous article, it literally collects all the traffic. To do that, it shows you all the traffic you send and receive on a Network interface. Wireshark is a powerful tool: it allows you to see what’s going on in a network.

Wireshark filter by source