Wide-area Packet Capture with PacketStreamer

PacketStreamer is an open source project from Deepfence. It performs distributed packet capture (tcpdump-like) and aggregates the pcap data in a single pcap file. PacketStreamer supports a wide range of environments, including Kubernetes nodes, Docker hosts, Fargate instances and, of course, virtual and bare-metal servers.

Network packet capture is a well understood practice. The basic technology that modern tools are built on first appeared in a tool named ‘tcpdump’, released in 1988, and the associated file format (pcap) has stood the test of time.