When it comes to monitoring which of the applications, processes or services are connecting to the internet, I have always depended on the good old TCPView application. Originally developed by Mark Russinovich for WinInterntals, now TCPView is now being developed by Microsoft. Recently they have upgraded it to 64-it version too.
However, if you want to have a visual element when monitoring the network traffic, then you should try Sniffnet. It is a free application that offers almost the same exact features as TCPView and in addition it also adds a graphical view of the network traffic. Sniffnet is a great tool for real-time network traffic monitoring. There is another difference – TCPView is portable but Sniffnet has to be installed for use.
When we launch Sniffnet, we can choose which of the network adapters has to be monitored. Usually, a typical Windows PC uses only one network adapter at a time. But more than one network adapters might be used in some special network configurations. The graphs show incoming traffic in the red color and the outgoing traffic in the blue color.
The Sniffnet window displays the UDP/TCP traffic along with the protocol being used. It displays the source and destination IP addresses or ports. For each of the connections established, it shows the number of packets sent or received. Similarly, it shows the number of bytes transferred.
In the Sniffnet window, it also displays a filtered view of the network statistics for each of the standard protocols such as HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, DHCP, POP, IMAP, IMAPS, FTPS, NTP, SSH, LDAP, POP3S and more.
In addition to showing everything graphically, we can also obtain results in the form of a report in text format. In the report, we can save everything related to network traffic, information for each connection, IP addresses, ports, protocols and the number of bytes sent or received.
You can download Sniffnet from https://github.com/GyulyVGC/sniffnet.