I recently was involved on a performance trouble shooting exercise for a company that uses Citrix to access their core ERP application. As part of the exercise individual users has taken packet captures using WireShark for key business transactions. The transactions types where the same for all the users but the users where are different locations. The common metric from the captures was the amount of data exchanged for the transaction and the session length. As there where many locations, transaction types and users the best way to do this was to automate the analysis.
I decided that I would use python as I was fairly familiar with the language and there where several libraries for WireShark analysis.
The chosen library was http://kiminewt.github.io/pyshark/ and a good tutorial on how to use this can be found here http://thepacketgeek.com/pyshark-using-the-packet-object/
The code imports, iterates through the files in the given directory (which should point to the wireshark capture files). When it finds a capture all the citrix packets are loaded into a capture array using a filter using the citrix port number
cap = pyshark.FileCapture(pcap_file,display_filter="tcp.port == 2598")
Once the cap array is populated then a loop iterates through the array summing the size of the payload data
#Iterate through the cap array
for i in cap:
# If the packet has payload data add that to the size counter
try:
if i.data:
size = size + int(i.data.len)
except:
pass
Finally, once the array has been processed then the payload size and session time is printed out. The session time is the timestamp of the last frame in the array which is held in the iteration variable i minus the timestamp for the first frame in the array. I have used epoch time so the result is in seconds. print file, ": is :",size,": size and :",float(i.frame_info.time_epoch)-float(cap[0].frame_info.time_epoch)
The complete code with a bit of error processing is here:
import pyshark
import os
directory = "/home/andrew/Documents/CaptureDirectory"
#Iterate through every file in the directory
for file in os.listdir(directory):
#Analyse if it a wireshark capture files
if file.endswith(".pcapng"):
#Populate cap array with packets matching using the citrix port 2598
size = 0
pcap_file = (directory + "/" + file)
cap = pyshark.FileCapture(pcap_file,display_filter="tcp.port == 2598")
#Iterate through the capute array
for i in cap:
# If the packet has payload data add that to the size counter
try:
if i.data:
size = size + int(i.data.len)
except:
pass
# Print out payload size and session duration
if size > 0:
print file, ": is :",size,": size and :",float(i.frame_info.time_epoch)-float(cap[0].frame_info.time_epoch)
else:
print file," No Citrix"
An example of the output is
andrew@debian:~$ python summary.py
smith-tran12.pcapng : is : 89636 : size and : 47.6105160713
davies-tran1.pcapng : is : 267292 : size and : 62.6023669243
smith-tran11.pcapng : is : 242545 : size and : 37.8602318764
kirby-tran1.pcapng No Citrix
