NETSCOUT Systems, Inc. is a provider of integrated computer network performance management products. NETSCOUT products include packet Sniffer and nGenius packet flow recorder. It is headquartered in Westford, Massachusetts and has approximately 800 employees. NETSCOUT serves the enterprise community, government agencies and telecommunications service providers. At various times NETSCOUT acquired the companies Network General and Fidelia Technology.
Wireshark is a free and open-source packet analyzer. It is used for network troubleshooting, analysis, software and communications protocol development, and education. Originally named Ethereal, the project was renamed Wireshark in May 2006 due to trademark issues. Wireshark is cross-platform, using the GTK+ widget toolkit in current releases, and Qt in the development version, to implement its user interface, and using pcap to capture packets; it runs on Linux, OS X, BSD, Solaris, some other Unix-like operating systems, and Microsoft Windows. There is also a terminal-based version called TShark. Wireshark, and the other programs distributed with it such as TShark, are free software, released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.