Open-source tools like Wireshark, Zeek, and Suricata are essential for understanding what’s really happening on a network. They power everything from basic troubleshooting to advanced intrusion detection. However, as anyone who has tried to operationalize them knows, powerful tools are only part of the equation.
At QA Cafe, we’ve built two solutions to help teams turn those open-source tools into sustainable, scalable, and product-friendly capabilities:
Both are built on a simple idea: open-source network tooling is incredibly valuable, but it’s not a turnkey solution. We maintain the complex parts so you don’t have to, while making them accessible to your team or your users.
Wireshark, Zeek, and Suricata are three of the most respected names in network analysis. They’re community-supported, actively maintained, and trusted by experts worldwide. But despite their maturity, these tools were never designed to “just drop in” to a secure enterprise environment or a polished cloud product.
To use them effectively at scale, your teams and your users must:
None of that is a reason to avoid open source! But it is a reason to treat it with care. Without clear ownership and structure, these tools quickly become difficult to support and harder to trust.
For product teams building cloud-managed network or security platforms, Wireshark is the natural foundation for packet visibility. Your customers love it and they want it, but integrating it into your product is more complicated than it sounds. Most platforms default to a “Download PCAP” button, leaving customers to use Wireshark on their own.
That might work for experts, but it’s a rough experience for everyone else. It introduces context-switching, data handling concerns, and an inconsistent user journey. Worse, it leaves a gap in your product story: the user gets the data, but not the tools to understand it in place.
Packet Viewer solves this by embedding the familiar Wireshark interface directly into your application. It’s a self-contained set of components (frontend and backend) that gives your users:
We built Packet Viewer to provide a comprehensive, in-app Wireshark experience that feels like an integral part of your platform.
We utilize Packet Viewer in our own enterprise-grade packet analysis product. CloudShark Enterprise takes the same core components from Packet Viewer and expands them into a complete pcap analysis solution for enterprise IT, cybersecurity, and NOC/SOC teams. At its heart, it’s the same idea: take the best of open source, and make it sustainable and secure for organizations at scale.
We start with Wireshark (via the Packet Viewer backend) and then layer on Zeek and Suricata as first-class analysis engines. Each brings a different lens to packet data:
Each is valuable on its own, but together, they offer a comprehensive view of packet captures. And because we maintain all three as part of the platform, they’re configured to work together, letting you pivot directly to the packets from a Zeek log or Suricata alert.
Meanwhile, CloudShark Enterprise does the heavy lifting of:
For teams who rely on packet captures as part of incident response, forensics, or network diagnostics, CloudShark Enterprise lets them work faster and more confidently, without the operational burden of running these tools themselves.
Wireshark, Zeek, and Suricata are best-in-class tools. However, running them in production, in customer-facing platforms, or as part of an enterprise security program takes real work.
With Packet Viewer, product teams can embed Wireshark into their applications without building their own UI or maintaining backend decoders.
With CloudShark Enterprise, network and security teams get a secure and scalable system for working with packets, powered by Wireshark, Zeek, and Suricata, and tailored to the operational realities of enterprise environments.
In the end, it’s not wise to try to change or reinvent what open source does best. But we can make them easier to use and get them to work together in the places it matters most.
