Modern networks generate more data than ever before. With high-speed links, distributed services, and the growing number of connected devices, security and IT teams are forced to operate constant packet capture and monitoring.
But today, even short captures on enterprise networks can balloon to gigabytes in seconds. At those sizes, traditional workflows simply break down. It’s challenging to find answers in that much data, and sharing files across teams becomes a costly exercise in bandwidth. It’s no wonder some teams have tried to move away from pcaps altogether, preferring dashboards, metadata, or even AI-assisted tools that promise quick answers.
At QA Cafe, we’re solving the pain of large captures. Large File Support, coming soon in CloudShark Enterprise 5.1, makes even your largest capture files instantly usable. Here’s why that’s so important - and how we are tackling the problem.
The Problem: You Still Need to Capture Everything
You can’t solve what you can’t see. Dashboards are helpful, but they’re just summaries. AI models can highlight anomalies, but they’re only as good as their training data. The packet capture remains the ultimate source of truth for network and security analysis, and working with those massive captures has been frustratingly inefficient.
Many tools try to solve this by pre-filtering data, capturing only what seems relevant at the time. But you often have only this one chance to capture an incident, and you rarely already know what you are looking for. When the incident happens hours or days later, the missing packets are often the ones that matter most. The result is an incomplete picture with inaccurate data.
Enterprises need a way to capture everything without grinding their workflows to a halt. They need a way to store, search, and dissect massive packet captures efficiently, without wasting analyst hours or network bandwidth.
With Large File Support and Deep Search, CloudShark Enterprise finally makes the “too big to open” problem disappear.
1. Upload: Upload a multi-gigabyte capture and CloudShark’s unique Time to First Packet workflow means you don’t have to wait for giant files to fully load before getting to work. The first 50,000 packets are ready for review in seconds, so you can start investigating right away.
2. Split: To get the full details, CloudShark lets you split captures based on either time slices or number of packets without having to do it yourself. For example, you could break up a large file into a series of 5-second captures or into chunks of a few thousand packets.
3. Deep Search: Once split, CloudShark Deep Search applies the full power of Wireshark’s display filters across every segment of the original PCAP, every packet,every layer.. You can search with full fidelity for anything Wireshark understands—IP addresses, DNS queries, HTTP headers, TCP flags—and instantly pinpoint the data that matters most.
Then Use CloudShark’s Enterprise-Grade Tools
Large File Support is just one part of CloudShark Enterprise’s mission to bring enterprise-grade packet analysis to modern IT and cybersecurity teams.
With the ability to pivot to the packets directly from protocol sequence diagrams, or integrated Zeek and Suricata insights, CloudShark Enterprise eliminates fragmented workflows and the hidden costs of maintaining multiple open-source tools. Everything is accessible in one secure, self-deployed platform, without the compliance and privacy headaches of third-party cloud systems.
The Result
CloudShark Enterprise turns large-scale packet analysis from a bottleneck into an advantage.
- What used to take hours opening, splitting, sharing, and searching huge captures now takes minutes or seconds.
- Analysts spend less time wrestling with tools and more time investigating issues.
- Enterprises save bandwidth, storage, and operational overhead while gaining visibility they can actually act on.
Ready to See It in Action?
The “too-big-to-open” era of packet analysis is over. CloudShark Enterprise Large File Support is rolling out soon—bringing scalable, high-speed packet visibility to the largest networks in the world.
