HackingTheUniverse

Etherape is a passive network monitoring tool that collects information and displays it graphically. As etherape it marks the nodes by IP address or mac address (according to settings) and then draws lines connecting them to represent traffic and colors the lines by protocol. As the traffic volume increases, the size of both the nodes and the lines grow larger. This makes it easy to see bursts of traffic and to identify the direction and the protocol involved. It can also replay capture files from other sources, such as tcpdump or wireshark.

Etherape – [etherape.sourceforge.net]

Features
At the present time, EtherApe has enough functionality to be useful, but it’s far from complete. It’s still beta software, and new features and bug fixes are being added all the time. Here is the list of features, current as of version 0.9.5, in no particular order:
Network traffic is displayed graphically. The more “talkative” a node is, the bigger its representation.
Node and link color shows the most used protocol.
User may select what level of the protocol stack to concentrate on.
You may either look at traffic within your network, end to end IP, or even port to port TCP.
Data can be captured “off the wire” from a live network connection, or read from a tcpdump capture file.
Live data can be read from ethernet, FDDI, PPP and SLIP interfaces.
The following frame and packet types are currently supported: ETH_II, 802.2, 803.3, IP, IPv6, ARP, X25L3, REVARP, ATALK, AARP, IPX, VINES, TRAIN, LOOP, VLAN, ICMP, IGMP, GGP, IPIP, TCP, EGP, PUP, UDP, IDP, TP, IPV6, ROUTING, RSVP, GRE, ESP, AH, ICMPV6, EON, VINES, EIGRP, OSPF, ENCAP, PIM, IPCOMP, VRRP; and most TCP and UDP services, like TELNET, FTP, HTTP, POP3, NNTP, NETBIOS, IRC, DOMAIN, SNMP, etc.
Data display can be refined using a network filter.
Display averaging and node persistence times are fully configurable.
Name resolution is done using standard libc functions, thus supporting DNS, hosts file, etc.
Clicking on a node/link opens a detail dialog showing protocol breakdown and other traffic statistics.
Protocol summary dialog shows global traffic statistics by protocol.
Scrollkeeper-compatible manual.