Why Arkime is a Game-Changer for Network Forensics (and Why It's Not Just Another Wireshark)

Let’s be honest — dealing with network traffic at scale isn’t exactly a walk in the park. Sure, command-line tools are powerful, flexible, and scriptable. But if you’ve ever tried to string together a bunch of scripts to process large volumes of PCAPs, you know how quickly things can turn into a tangled mess. Debugging scripts, managing tools, filtering data, reviewing results — it’s like solving a puzzle... blindfolded.

Naturally, when we need to dig into network packets, most of us reach for Wireshark. It’s a trusted friend — great for deep packet inspection, clean interface, amazing protocol support.

But the second you throw gigabytes (or terabytes) of traffic at it? Boom. It chokes. 🫣

So what’s the alternative if we want to scale up without shelling out thousands of dollars for commercial network forensics solutions?

Say hello to Arkime.

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🌐 Meet Arkime: Open Source, Scalable, and Surprisingly Powerful

Arkime (previously known as Moloch, and yes, you’ll still see that name floating around in some commands and docs) is an open-source tool designed specifically to capture, index, and analyze network traffic — at scale.

What makes it stand out? Three things:

• It captures full packet data.

• It indexes traffic for lightning-fast search.

• It gives you a clean web interface to explore, filter, and export PCAPs.

Think of Arkime as the bridge between bare-bones command-line tools and overpriced commercial network forensics platforms. It was originally created by folks at AOL (yes, that AOL) who needed something robust but flexible. Fast forward to today, and it’s used by defenders and analysts worldwide who want powerful PCAP analysis without blowing their budget.

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🧩 How Arkime Works — Without the Boring Diagrams

Arkime isn’t just one single app — it’s a modular system:

1. Capture Node: Think of this as the sensor. It grabs packets off the wire and stores them.

2. Elasticsearch: This is where Arkime keeps track of all the session metadata — aka, Session Profile Information (SPI). This lets you search super fast, even across billions of packets.

3. Viewer: The web interface where you search, filter, view session details, and extract PCAPs.

   
   

Now here’s where it gets cool: Arkime scales horizontally. That means you can run everything on one box if you’re working with small-to-mid traffic volumes (like in a lab).

But in a real-world environment? You can deploy multiple capture nodes across your network — each feeding metadata back to a centralized Elasticsearch cluster.

So yeah, it’s built for scale.

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🧪 Real Talk: Where Arkime Shines and Where It Stumbles

Arkime is not perfect, and it's not trying to be everything for everyone. But here’s a breakdown:

✅ What’s Awesome:

• Free and open source. (Did I mention that already? Worth repeating.)

• Scalable across small labs or large, enterprise-wide deployments.

• Fast search across massive PCAP data.

• Simple, browser-based UI for analysis.

• Integration-friendly — you can plug Arkime into other tools or SIEMs easily.

• Active community — if you’re stuck, there’s a free Slack group where the devs actually reply!

❌ Where It Falls Short:

• Protocol coverage isn’t as wide as Wireshark. Some obscure or proprietary protocols just won’t parse unless you write your own parser (which isn’t trivial).

• Live traffic at high speeds? Yeah, that’s where you’ll need to invest time in tuning. Poor architecture = dropped packets.

• No official support. This is community-powered. If your boss wants an SLA, you’re out of luck unless you hire third-party consultants.

• Deployment complexity increases with scale. You need to understand Elasticsearch well and know how to tune it for performance and stability.

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🧠 Why You Should Care (Even If You’re Just a One-Person DFIR Team)

Let’s face it — not everyone works at a fancy SOC with million-dollar tools. Whether you're running a home lab, working incident response at a midsize company, or just learning packet forensics, Arkime fills that sweet spot between Wireshark and expensive enterprise tools like RSA NetWitness or Fidelis.

Need to:

• Hunt down command and control traffic?

• Pull sessions involving a suspicious domain?

• Track data exfiltration over DNS or HTTP?

Arkime makes all of that way easier, without you spending hours combing through raw PCAPs manually.

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Please note: For demonstration purposes, I installed Arkime using WSL. However, this setup is not recommended for production use. For optimal performance and full functionality, it is strongly advised to install Arkime on a native Ubuntu environment or a dedicated Linux server.

Installing Package

Configuring Arkime

You can have maxmind account and can say yes but I said no

Run the service

Next Add user

Enable the service

Once done Visit http://localhost:8005/

Output

While it's possible to run Arkime on WSL for testing purposes, please note that resource consumption—particularly CPU and memory usage—can increase rapidly during operation. If you're using WSL, I recommend disabling services like arkime-capture, arkime-viewer, and elasticsearch after completing your tests to avoid unnecessary system strain.

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🚀 Final Thoughts

Arkime isn’t trying to replace Wireshark — it’s trying to extend your power as a network analyst. It’s not flashy. It won’t hold your hand. But if you give it a chance, it’ll become one of the most powerful tools in your forensics arsenal.

---------------------------------------------------Dean-------------------------------------------------

Do not miss upcoming article!!!!

Querying Like a Pro in Arkime: Getting the Most Out of Arkime Viewer: Beyond the Basics