Starlet #1 Sniffnet - Cross-platform Internet Traffic Monitor
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Starlet #1 Sniffnet - Cross-platform Internet Traffic Monitor

Giuliano 4 min read

This is the first issue of The Starlet List. If you want to prompt your open source project on star-history.com for free, please check out our announcement.


Sniffnet is an open-source network monitoring tool to help everyone analyze their Internet traffic with ease.

Whether you want to gather statistics, or you need to inspect more in depth what's going on in your network, this app will get you covered. 🫦

What makes it unique

Sniffnet is a technical tool, but at the same time it strongly focuses on the overall user experience: most of the network analyzers out there are cumbersome to use, while one of Sniffnet's cornerstones is to be usable with ease by everyone.

The gathered information is displayed in a clear and impactful way that makes it straightforward to have a look to what's flowing in a computer network card.

Furthermore, this application is totally developed in Rust: a modern programming language to build efficient and reliable software, emphasizing performance and safety.

Rust efficiency and reliability makes Sniffnet a perfectly fluid application even in presence of higher traffic loads and allows the app to be composed by multiple threads without incurring in problematic race conditions.

The application is cross-platform compatible with all the major operating systems: Windows, macOS, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD... and more.

On the official website you can find more instructions on how to download the app for your OS.

Features

  • 🏷️ Select a set of filters to apply to the observed traffic
  • 📖 View overall statistics about your Internet traffic
  • 📈 View real-time charts about traffic intensity
  • 🌐 Get details about domain names and network providers of the hosts you are exchanging traffic with
  • 🏠 Identify connections in your local network
  • 🌍 Discover the geographical location of the remote hosts
  • ⭐ Save your favorite network hosts
  • 🔉 Set custom notifications to inform you when defined network events occur
  • 🎨 Choose the style that fits you the most from 4 different available themes
  • 🕵️‍♂️ Inspect each of your network connections in real time
  • 📁 Save complete textual report with detailed information for each network connection:
    • Source and destination IP addresses
    • Source and destination ports
    • Carried protocols
    • Amount of exchanged packets and bytes
    • Initial and final timestamp of information exchange
  • ... and more!

Star growth

Sniffnet is a very young application, but as shown by the Star History chart it had a stunning growth during the past months.

Star History Chart

The main events that caused this astonishing growth are reported in the following:

  • in November 2022, Sniffnet first stable version was released and it was featured in the overall GitHub trending page
  • in April 2023, the application was announced to be selected for the GitHub Accelerator Program
  • in May 2023, Sniffnet was featured on Hacker News front page

Sniffnet's growth is particularly impressive when compared with the other popular network analyzers, including Wireshark:

Star History Chart

Future development

Sniffnet is still on the way of being a complete network analyzer, but the traction it recently gained shows that the app has a huge potential.

Sniffnet is continuously maintained and new feature will be introduced in the future, such as support for ICMP, read and write of PCAP files, process IDs recognition, and more.

The project is open to corporate partnerships: if you are a company and believe in the project, you can consider pioneering Sniffnet growth.