Brim: Open-source desktop app to analyze large pcaps through the lens of Zeek

Wireshark dissects protocols and gives debugging traces. Zeek (FKA "Bro") is an intrusion detection system that analyzes debugging traces (which it generates itself, not through Wireshark dissectors) to generate usefully semantic data, ranging from "which hosts are fetching this URL" to "where are there signs of this vulnerability being exploited".

Both Wireshark and Zeek use libpcap, which is the de facto standard for raw packet captures, so yes, the same data you'd be feeding to Wireshark to browse, you can also feed to Zeek to analyze.

It might be more useful to think of Brim in terms of "a different zoom level" than "better than". Wireshark focuses on showing as much detail as it can about every packet that you see. If you have a lot of packets this will burn a corresponding amount of CPU time and memory. Brim, Packet Analyzer (mentioned in another comment), and other tools zoom out a bit and let you process a larger number of packets, but with less detail. If needed you can pass the interesting and relevant ones to Wireshark for more detailed inspection and analysis.

Disclosures: Wireshark pays for my mortgage. My employer makes Packet Analyzer. I'm friends with people at Brim.

The long and short of it is Zeek(used to be call Bro) provides session based analysis whereas wireshark is primarily packet based. With a few exceptions, they both generally do the same thing but in different ways. Zeek is at the bones, an event-based engine with a scripting language (think node-js but from the 80s!) - the scripting language is actually what provides the logs generated by Zeek.

One key aspect of Zeek is that it can be deployed within a network to passively generate logs. As an incident response consultant, the few times I've worked with a client with Zeek logs, our ability to answer some critical questions in short order was increased dramatically! Back in my Sysadmin days, I used to run Zeek (when it was called Bro) to provide network logs for security review but also for general network analysis.

You can definitely run a pcap capture by wireshark through Zeek. you'd run `zeek -r <yourpcap>` and you'll end up with some lovely TSV separated logs in your current working directory!

Full transparency: I'm not part of the Zeek team, but I did author the original Zeek scripting guide for them back in 2012 or so. For my money, the Zeek team is building some of the better network appliances and detection/logging capabilities available.

Zeek is actually super powerful.

It’s more of a Network Security Monitoring tool (NSM) than a Wireshark equivalent

It’s primary use case is to have a server(s) ingesting all traffic in a network and forwarding the traffic metadata to something like an Elastic Stack.

What makes it so powerful though, is that it actually has its own scripting language that allows you create automations based off what type of traffic is observed and these can be super intricate

Agreed. using bpf can eliminate some of the requirements for packet captures. Computing the metrics on the host, also eliminates the network traffic of exporting logs or pcaps to for instance splunk. [1]

Brendan Gregg wrote a book that digs really deep into the bpf system. [2] I recommend you check it out if you need to do real work fast.

[1]: https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/StreamApp/7.2.0/Deploy... [2]: http://www.brendangregg.com/bpf-performance-tools-book.html

Definitely prefer the Github link, the short intro video gives you a very quick understanding of a good part of the value proposition, what this tool does in general, etc.