Cocoa Packet Analyzer for Mac

App summary and primary function

Cocoa Packet Analyzer is a native macOS tool built with Cocoa that lets you inspect network traffic. It performs basic packet sniffing and packet-level protocol analysis, and is designed for quick captures and review on a Mac.

Starting a capture and storing results

• Choose the network interface you want to monitor, then press the Start control to begin capturing.
• Captured sessions are saved in PCAP files — the common industry format for reading, writing, and replaying packet streams.
• For thorough captures, enable promiscuous mode so the sniffer will record frames addressed to other MAC addresses on the same network.

Filtering and capture options

• Use regular expressions to create flexible, text-based filters that match packet contents.
• The interface provides simple controls to begin and stop capture sessions and to apply filter expressions on the fly.

Protocols and traffic types supported

• SIP
• RADIUS
• PPP protocols and related negotiation methods (for example LCP, IPCP, CCP, PAP, CHAP)
• PPPoE discovery and session types
• L2TP
• IGMP
• ICMP
• UDP
• TCP
• IP (both IPv6 and IPv4)
• Ethertype / ARP
• 802.1Q VLAN tagging
• Various link-layer types, loopback interfaces, and other low-level framing formats
• General IP protocol field handling and session-stage information for tunneling/PPP flows

Suggested alternative

• Minecraft (Java & Bedrock Edition) — Paid