Regarding measuring fragmentation, errors, and retransmissions, you can use a tool like Wireshark to capture and analyze network traffic. However, the MTU should be set to the same value on both sides of the connection. The reason I went through this myself was to track down a server that shouldn’t have been communicating externally often, was using a large amount if internet bandwidth every hour (on the hour).Firstly, it's important to note that an MTU of 1460 bytes is generally recommended for OpenVPN connections.

Now you have the power of Wireshark to analyse and log any packet traffic passing through your MikroTik device. You can use additional filters to further drill down into the packets if the Packet Sniffer filters on the MikroTik device were too limited. You should now be seeing the packets from your MikroTik device. Add the following filter to Wireshark to see the incoming packets from the device. MikroTik sends these packets via UDP on port 37008. Wireshark is able to decode these packets and display the original packet data to you in the interface. MikroTik will send the packet’s it captures in an encapsulated format, a TZSP packet. Fire up a capture session on the interface that is connected to the MikroTik – the client does not have to be physically attached to the device, just on a reachable network with the address you specified earlier. Once your done, enable the streaming by entering the following /tool sniffer start

This can be done from the terminal or via the GUI ( Tools > Packet Sniffer) /tool sniffer This was tested with RouterOS 6.2 on a RB2011UAS and Wireshark 2.2.3 on Windows 10.īegin by enabling the Packet Sniffer on the MikroTik device. This will supposedly work for wired and wireless clients, but I have not tested the latter. This post is to outline how to do live packet captures from a MikroTik Router (or any MT device) and stream it back to Wireshark running on a client on the network. Packet captures are an invaluable way to collect data for chasing down network issues, or even just for some additional visibility into what’s traversing your network. Happy New Year! And straight back into it with some casual network troubleshooting.

Mikrotik wireshark capture