Full Packet Capture Appliance
Our full packet capture appliance is a purpose-built platform engineered for sustained high-throughput packet ingestion, storage, indexing, and replay. Designed for distributed enterprise and federal environments, it delivers the performance, scalability, and integration capabilities required for long-term deployment.
Overview of Our
Full Packet Capture Appliance
SentryWire’s appliance is architected to capture, index, and retain full packet data at scale using commodity hardware and distributed storage design. Its modular architecture supports environments ranging from multi-site enterprise networks to high-throughput federal deployments, ensuring sustained packet capture performance without proprietary hardware constraints.
Unlike traditional single-server tools, SentryWire scales compute and storage seamlessly, delivering lightning-fast searches across 100+ PB of network packets. The platform combines high-speed recording with real-time filtering, visualization, and advanced BPF-syntax analysis. Integrated packet analysis functionality and network monitoring dashboards allow teams to investigate suspicious protocols, analyze traffic patterns, and accelerate root-cause analysis.
With extended retention timelines, SentryWire ensures packet data remains available long after most tools have aged out. This matters because state-sponsored intrusions often remain undetected for more than 146 days. Without a high-fidelity packet record, enterprises can’t answer critical questions: when attackers entered, how they moved laterally, or what data was exfiltrated.
The SentryWire Full Packet Capture Architecture
The SentryWire full packet capture appliance is engineered for sustained, enterprise-scale packet recording across distributed networks. Its architecture separates capture, storage, and search functions to maintain performance under high-throughput conditions.
By retaining complete packet data over extended timelines, the platform enables security teams to:
Conduct high-speed retrospective searches across historical packet data
Validate intrusion detection alerts using packet-level evidence
Perform threat hunting across previously captured network sessions
Support forensic investigations with replayable PCAP data
Unlike single-server systems, SentryWire scales compute and storage horizontally, allowing organizations to expand retention and search capacity without performance degradation.
This design ensures packet capture remains sustainable in federal, regulated, and critical infrastructure environments requiring long-term deployment.
Full Packet Capture
Unlike packet sniffers that only inspect headers or metadata, SentryWire captures complete network packets for forensic replay, deep packet inspection, and long-term analysis.
Powerful & Fast Search
Scale searches with compute and storage, streaming results from PCAP files in near real time without slowing down network performance.
Extended Timeline
Retain network traffic for weeks, months, or even years, ensuring analysts can revisit packet data long after most tools have aged out.
Fast Capture Speed
Capture at line rates from 1Mbps to +1Tbps with lossless performance, even during the burstiest network activity.
IDS Search Back
Use intrusion detection signatures to retroactively search stored packet data, identifying threats that only became known after capture.
Intrusion Detection
Integrated Suricata IDS provides real-time detection and retrospective analysis of suspicious traffic, enabling security teams to validate alerts and investigate threats using packet-level evidence.
Network Operations
Analyze network performance metrics derived from packet data to identify congestion, misconfigurations, and connectivity issues while maintaining a security-first monitoring focus.
Visualization & Analytics
Visualize network traffic and security events through interactive dashboards and Kibana integrations, supporting forensic analysis, anomaly detection, and investigation workflows at scale.
Artifact Extraction
Extract sessionized PCAPs and reconstruct file artifacts from captured traffic to support forensic analysis and evidence-based incident investigations.
Additional Platform Capabilities & Integrations
Software Updates: Continuous enhancements keep the full packet capture appliance aligned with evolving threats.
File Hashing: Extract and reconstitute file artifacts from packet captures via the Web UI.
JA3 Hashing & Threat Enrichment: Identify encrypted stream IOCs without decryption.
GeoIP & ASN Enrichment: Enrich metadata logs with location insights.
Enhanced Analytics via Kibana: Build dashboards for traffic anomalies and trends.
Statistical Baselining: Elastic-based analytics detect anomalies in network performance automatically.
Network Operations Analytics: In-browser packet analysis supports investigation of anomalous traffic patterns and network behavior.
Key Considerations for Deploying Full Packet Capture at Scale
Full packet capture provides unmatched visibility for security and forensic investigations and requires careful architectural consideration when deployed at enterprise scale. SentryWire is designed to address the operational challenges that have historically limited the practicality of packet capture in large and regulated environments.
Comprehensive Visibility
The appliance retains complete packet data across north–south and east–west traffic, enabling replayable reconstruction of network activity. This level of visibility supports forensic investigation, threat hunting, incident response, and compliance validation using authoritative packet-level evidence.
Storage Efficiency and Long-Term Retention
Traditional packet capture systems struggle with storage costs and retention limits. SentryWire’s distributed architecture enables long-term packet retention using commodity hardware, allowing organizations to preserve weeks, months, or years of packet data without excessive storage overhead.
Search Performance at Scale
Large PCAP datasets are historically slow to analyze. SentryWire scales search alongside compute and storage, streaming results in near real time so analysts can investigate incidents and perform retrospective analysis without delays.
Operational Complexity
Raw packet data can be difficult to interpret without the right tooling. SentryWire integrates visualization, analytics, IDS search-back, and artifact extraction to streamline investigations and reduce the manual effort required to reconstruct events.
Enterprise and Compliance Readiness
By capturing both north–south and east–west traffic and retaining packet data over extended timelines, SentryWire supports the visibility and retention requirements of the frameworks most commonly mandated in federal and regulated environments, including OMB M-21-31, CDM, NERC-CIP, HIPAA, and SEC 17a-4. By retaining complete packet data over extended timelines, the appliance provides the verifiable historical network evidence required for audits, investigations, and regulatory reporting.
FAQs
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A full packet capture appliance is a dedicated platform that records 100% of network traffic. Unlike basic sniffers, it provides forensic-grade evidence for troubleshooting, compliance, and security investigations.
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NetFlow and flow-based tools collect metadata summaries — connection times, IP addresses, byte counts — but discard the actual packet payload. Full packet capture retains the complete data stream, enabling forensic reconstruction of exactly what happened on the network. For incident response, threat hunting, and compliance, flow data alone is insufficient because it cannot answer what was said, only that a conversation occurred.
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A packet sniffer typically samples or inspects limited traffic in real time, while a full packet capture appliance records all packets continuously, enabling long-term retention, full replay, and forensic analysis.
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Full packet capture appliances are most critical in environments where compliance mandates, forensic readiness, and long-term network visibility are non-negotiable. Primary verticals include federal government agencies, defense, and critical infrastructure operators — particularly those running ICS/OT networks subject to frameworks like NERC-CIP and OMB M-21-31. Large enterprises in finance and healthcare with strict retention and audit requirements also rely on full packet capture where flow-based monitoring tools are insufficient.
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A full packet capture appliance supports network security monitoring by recording and retaining complete packet data across the network. This packet-level visibility enables security teams to investigate incidents, perform threat hunting, validate alerts, and conduct forensic analysis using an authoritative historical record.
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Full packet capture supports compliance with frameworks that require long-term network visibility and verifiable audit trails, including OMB M-21-31, CDM, NERC-CIP, HIPAA, and SEC 17a-4. Unlike flow-based tools, full packet capture retains complete packet data — not summaries or metadata — providing the forensic-grade evidence regulators and auditors require.
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NDR and XDR platforms analyze behavioral signals and generate alerts, but typically do not retain raw packet data. Full packet capture fills that gap by providing the underlying packet evidence needed to validate alerts, reconstruct attacks, and conduct forensic investigations. Together, they give security teams both real-time detection and the historical record required to investigate what NDR or XDR flags.
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Whether you’re exploring full packet capture for the first time or looking to optimize your current network visibility, our experts are here to help.