Libpcap provides a portable framework for low-level network monitoring. Libpcap can provide network statistics collection, security monitoring and network debugging. Since almost every system vendor provides a different interface for packet capture, the libpcap authors created this system-independent API to ease in porting and to alleviate the need for several system-dependent packet capture modules in each application.

Install libpcap if you need to do low-level network traffic monitoring on your network.