Enterprise Full Packet Capture
Full Packet Capture Appliance
SentryWire is an enterprise packet capture appliance built for full packet capture, network security monitoring, forensics, and compliance in federal, critical infrastructure, and regulated enterprise networks. It records all network traffic with lossless packet capture at line rates from 1Mbps to over 1Tbps, retains it for months to years on commodity hardware, and delivers 25 to 40% lower total cost of ownership than legacy packet capture platforms.
Platform
How SentryWire Captures, Stores, and Searches Packets at Enterprise Scale
Built for sustained throughput. SentryWire ingests, stores, indexes, and replays full packet data at high throughput across distributed enterprise and federal environments. Compute and storage scale independently, so a capture point that needs more retention does not need more processing, and one that needs faster search does not need more disk.
Search that keeps up with the capture. Analysts apply BPF filters across very large packet datasets, pivot from a SIEM alert directly to the sessions behind it, and export PCAP files to Wireshark or their existing analysis tools instead of working from summaries.
Retention is the point. Intrusions routinely go undetected for months. Without the packet captures from that window, a team cannot establish entry, lateral movement, or exfiltration, and the investigation ends in inference instead of evidence.
Integrates with the security stack you already trust
Why Full Packet Capture
Why Network Security Monitoring Requires Enterprise Full Packet Capture
See What Flow Data MissesLogs and flow records summarize. Logs, NetFlow, endpoint telemetry, and detection platforms describe that traffic happened. They record connection times, addresses, and byte counts, and discard the payload that carried the actual activity.
Detection tools alert, then move on. NDR, XDR, and IDS platforms raise an alert and keep a short buffer around it. When the question is what else that host did over the past six weeks, the evidence is already gone.
Enterprise full packet capture keeps everything. Every header and every payload, retained long enough to reconstruct an intrusion end to end, validate an alert against the real traffic, and hand an auditor packet-level proof rather than a summary.
Architecture
The SentryWire Full Packet Capture Architecture
Capture, storage, and search run as separate functions so none of them degrades the others under load, and each scales horizontally on commodity hardware.
The platform complements SIEM, IDS, SOAR, and analytics tools rather than replacing them. It is the evidence layer those tools pivot into.
- Retrospective searches across historical packet data
- Validating intrusion detection alerts against the real traffic
- Threat hunting across captured sessions
- Forensic replay of PCAP data
Full Packet Capture
Captures complete headers and payloads, not sampled traffic or metadata.
Powerful and Fast Search
Search scales with the deployment and streams PCAP results as they are found.
Extended Timeline
Retain network traffic for weeks, months, or years, sized to your mandate.
Fast Capture Speed
Capture at line rates from 1Mbps to over 1Tbps without packet loss.
IDS Search Back
Run newer IDS signatures against historical traffic to find what was missed.
Intrusion Detection
Integrated Suricata IDS runs against live and stored traffic.
Performance Telemetry from Packet Data
Derive latency, congestion, and throughput metrics from captured packets so security and infrastructure teams work from the same evidence, without a separate monitoring tool.
Visualization and Analytics
Dashboards and Kibana integrations built on the captured data.
Artifact Extraction
Sessionized PCAPs and file reconstruction straight from the capture store.
Also included
- File hashing for threat intel matching
- JA3 TLS fingerprinting and threat enrichment
- GeoIP and ASN enrichment
- Statistical baselining
- Versioned software updates
Fit
Designed for Regulated and High-Consequence Environments
SentryWire deploys on commodity hardware the customer can source, replace, and expand, which is what makes a 10-year deployment affordable.
- Federal government agencies
- Defense and regulated public sector
- Critical infrastructure and ICS/OT networks
- Large enterprises with audit obligations
What SentryWire Is Not
SentryWire is purpose-built for security monitoring, forensics, and compliance in environments that expect a capture platform to stay in place for a decade or more. It is not the right fit for every network.
- Not a network troubleshooting tool. Performance metrics are a byproduct of packet data, not the reason to deploy it.
- Not flow monitoring. If summarized metadata is enough for your use case, a NetFlow collector will cost less and do the job.
- Not a short-term or low-budget deployment. SentryWire is designed for organizations with compliance mandates, forensic readiness requirements, and multi-year retention needs.
Compliance
Compliance-Driven Visibility
Regulators increasingly require verifiable, long-term network evidence. Full packet capture is the only control that produces it.
Each of these frameworks asks the same question in different words: can you prove what happened on the network, for how long, and to whom? Log retention answers part of it. Packet retention answers all of it, because the packets are the primary record every other artifact is derived from.
SentryWire gives compliance and security teams the same evidence base, so audit response and incident response pull from one store instead of two.
Show Me Compliance-Ready CaptureProof
Proven in Federal and Critical Infrastructure Networks
Deployments are expected to remain in place for 10 or more years, which is why the platform runs on hardware the customer controls.
At a Glance
Full Packet Capture vs. NetFlow vs. NDR
| Capability | NetFlow / Flow-Based | NDR / XDR | Traditional Packet Capture | SentryWire |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Captures full packet payload | No | Partial | Yes | Yes |
| Retention timeline | Days to weeks | Days | Days to weeks | Months to years |
| Line-rate capture | No | Limited | Hardware-bound | Up to 1 Tbps |
| Scales on commodity hardware | N/A | No | No | Yes |
| Forensic-grade replay | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Cost per PB retained | Low | N/A | High | 25 to 40% lower |
| Primary use case | Network summaries | Alerting and detection | Short-window forensics | Forensics, scale, retention |
Use Cases
Where Teams Use Full Packet Capture Every Day
Incident Response
Reconstruct entry, movement, and exfiltration from the packets.
Explore →Threat Hunting
Hunt across months of sessions, not a 48-hour buffer.
Explore →Forensic Analysis
Replay sessions and extract files as court-ready evidence.
See a demo →Intrusion Detection Validation
Confirm or dismiss every alert against real traffic.
See a demo →Network Security Monitoring
Continuous packet-level visibility across the enterprise.
Explore →FAQ
Full Packet Capture Appliance FAQs
How does full packet capture differ from NetFlow or flow-based monitoring?
NetFlow and flow-based tools collect metadata summaries: connection times, IP addresses, and byte counts. They do not retain the payload, so they can tell you that two hosts talked, but not what was said. Full packet capture records both headers and payloads, which is what forensic investigation and compliance evidence require. Read the full comparison.
What should an enterprise packet capture appliance include?
A packet capture appliance built for security should capture lossless at full line rate from a monitoring port, SPAN session, or network TAP, write every packet to indexed storage with precise timestamps, retain traffic for the window your mandate requires, and let analysts search and export PCAP files to Wireshark, Splunk, or Elastic. Packet capture tools that sample traffic, cap retention at days, or depend on proprietary capture cards fail at least one of those tests, which is where most packet capture solutions fall short for compliance and forensics.
How does a full packet capture appliance support network security monitoring?
A full packet capture appliance supports network security monitoring by recording and retaining complete packet data, so analysts can move from an alert to the underlying traffic, validate it, and investigate retroactively across the full retention window.
What compliance mandates does full packet capture help satisfy?
Full packet capture supports compliance with frameworks that require long-term network visibility and verifiable evidence, including OMB M-21-31, CDM, NERC-CIP, SOC 2, HIPAA, and SEC 17a-4.
How does full packet capture complement NDR and XDR solutions?
NDR and XDR platforms analyze behavioral signals and generate alerts, but typically do not retain raw packet data. Full packet capture preserves the evidence those alerts are based on, so a detection can be confirmed, scoped, and investigated instead of taken on faith.
How does full packet capture support incident response?
During an incident, investigators rely on preserved packet data to determine how an intrusion occurred, which systems were touched, and what left the network. Without it, the response is reconstructed from logs and inference.
How much storage does full packet capture require?
Storage scales with your capture rate and retention target, and SentryWire keeps that cost down by writing full packets to commodity storage that expands horizontally. That architecture, rather than proprietary FPGA-based capture cards and vendor-locked storage, is what produces the 25 to 40% lower total cost of ownership compared with legacy packet capture platforms.
Can SentryWire replace an existing packet capture system?
Yes. SentryWire is designed as a modernization path for legacy packet capture deployments that have hit performance or storage limits. Most organizations run SentryWire alongside the existing system until retention parity is reached, then retire the legacy platform.
How is SentryWire deployed across distributed or multi-site networks?
SentryWire deploys as capture appliances at each network segment or site, with centralized search across every capture point. Analysts query one index rather than logging into individual sensors, and compute and storage scale independently at each location.
Does SentryWire integrate with our existing SIEM, IDS, and SOAR tools?
Yes. SentryWire integrates with Splunk, Elastic, Suricata, and SOAR platforms so an alert in your existing stack can pivot directly to the underlying packets. It complements detection tools by preserving the evidence they summarize; it does not replace them.
Demo
See Full Packet Capture in Action
Free, 60-Minute Demo
A tailored walkthrough covering capture, filtering, retention, and integration with Splunk, Elastic, and your existing SIEM, on traffic patterns that look like yours.
- Free, no obligation
- 60 minutes, tailored to your environment
- Same-day response from a SentryWire engineer
Works with your stack
Enterprise full packet capture, 1 Mbps to 1 Tbps+, months to years of retention.
Request a Packet Capture Demo