Packet Capture Initiation

From the command line, you can initiate a live packet capture session to view packet traffic on your network. For example, you might want to confirm the network configuration or to perform troubleshooting.

During a packet capture session, the system creates a set of .pcap files in the /opt/traces directory. If the /opt/traces directory contains files when you run the packet-trace command, the system prompts you to either remove or keep the existing files before running the command. The following table describes the system behavior for both options.

Option	Result	Packet Trace Command Behavior
Yes	Removes all existing files.	The system captures up to 25 new .pcap files. During the session, the system rotates the files in the /opt/traces directory by size. For example, the system keeps the last 25 files and rotates them when they reach 100 MB
No	Keeps all existing files.	If the /opt/traces directory contains 25 .pcap files, the system cannot add more files to the directory or overwrite the existing files. If the /opt/traces directory contains fewer than 25 .pcap files, the system can add new files to the directory up to the 25 file limit. For example, if the /opt/traces directory contains 10 existing files, the system can add up to 15 new files.

Use the packet-trace [local | remote] [start | stop] [<network-interface>] command to initiate a packet capture session.