Sysdig launches Stratoshark, a “Wireshark for the Cloud”

Sysdig is trying to make it easier for IT teams to gain visibility into their cloud-native environments with the launch of Stratoshark. This new open source tool extends the capabilities of the popular network analysis tool Wireshark into the cloud.

According to Sysdig, Wireshark has over 5 million daily users and has accumulated over 160 million downloads in the last decade. However, as companies have transitioned to the cloud, there hasn’t been a comparable open source alternative to Wireshark for cloud environments. 

Stratoshark was created by Sysdig’s founder and CTO Loris Degioanni and its director of open source Gerald Combs – both of whom also co-created Wireshark. 

It builds upon the capabilities of Wireshark and Sysdig’s other open source project, Falco, which is used for cloud-native threat detection. 

“By combining Wireshark’s rich network insights with Falco’s real-time cloud-native security, Stratoshark equips teams to better understand cloud events, logs, and system calls with open source accessibility,” said Degioanni.

Stratoshark allows users to investigate the application-level behavior of systems, offering the ability to capture system call and log activity, and then troubleshoot and analyze that activity.

According to Sysdig, users of Wireshark will notice several similarities as they use much of the same UI and have the same dissection and filtering engine. It also supports the same file format as Falco and Sysdig CLI, which allows users to easily switch between the tools. 

“Wireshark revolutionized network analysis by democratizing packet captures, a concept that Sysdig brought to cloud-native workloads and Falco extended to cloud runtime security,” said Combs. “Wireshark users live by the phrase ‘pcap or it didn’t happen,’ but until now cloud packet capture hasn’t been easy or even possible. Stratoshark helps unlock this level of visibility, equipping network professionals with a familiar tool that makes system call and log analysis as accessible and transformative for the cloud as Wireshark did for network packet analysis.”