PTP Track Hound uses the PCAP API (WinPcap/libpcap) and a special Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) to capture PTP network traffic. It then analyzes the incoming packets and displays detected PTP devices, their current state and the hypothetical network hierarchy.

PTP Track Hound is free software. You can download it without paying any license fee.

Read all about the licensing of PTP Track Hound here.

You can use PTP Track Hound on any computer or server within the network you want to monitor. Please note, that you might need to configure a mirror port on your network switch to see PTP unicast traffic, see Q 17.

No, PTP Track Hound does not need any special hardware. It can be used on any system which is able to run Wireshark.

PTP Track Hound runs on Windows 7 64-bit or all later 64-bit Windows versions.

PTP Track Hound runs on Mint Linux 19, Ubuntu 18.04, Debian 10 or later Debian-based 64-bit Linux distributions, as well as on openSUSE Leap 15.1 or later SUSE-based 64-bit Linux versions. Please use the .deb package for all Debian-based systems, whereas the .rpm package should be used for SUSE-based systems. Of course, not all Linux distributions have been tested, so please feel free to try running it on any other Linux version that is not listed here.

Yes, PTP Track Hound can also be used on macOS 10.9 64-bit or later. Please mount the .dmg disk image and run the ptpTrackHound.pkg installer to install the application. After the successful installation, PTP Track Hound can be found in the Applications folder and started per double click.

To set up a portable version of PTP Track Hound, simply copy the application folder (i.e. "C:\Program Files\Meinberg\PTP Track Hound", "/usr/share/ptpTrackHound") to a USB-stick. If not present, you will have to install the npcap library on the appropriate system. The installer for npcap is included in the application folder, on Linux systems simply install the "libpcap" package.

Unfortunately, openSUSE and other SUSE- or Fedora-based Linux distributions do not provide a graphical user interface for the installation of rpm packages. Therefore, you have to open a terminal and install the rpm package via the command:
rpm -i [path_to_package]/ptptrackhound.x86_64.rpm

Yes, provided that the capture file has been saved in the standard PCAP format (.pcap). PCAP-ng files (.pcapng) are not supported. You can open a PCAP file via the application menu (File > Open...) or simply drag and drop it into the message list.

Yes, the current capture can be saved into a PCAP file (.pcap) and opened in Wireshark or any other application that supports the standard PCAP format. You can also configure PTP Track Hound to automatically dump all captured packets into one big file.

Yes, PTP Track Hound automatically frees used system memory from time to time by deleting old messages and can therefore run in the background without problems. The trigger for deleting old messages can be configured by the user. It can be the total number of messages, the message age or the amount of used system memory.

Yes, generally PTP Track Hound and Wireshark can be used to capture traffic simultaneously. In rare cases, when using particular network adapters, there might occur problems when restarting the capture in one of the applications. The other application will then not receive any packets any longer. A restart of the appropriate application should fix the problem.

PTP Track Hound captures PTPv1 and PTPv2 over IEEE 802.3 (Layer 2) or UDP/IP (IPv4/IPv6, Layer 3). In addition to that, VLAN and/or HSR tagged frames and VSS-Monitoring trailers are supported.

PTP Track Hound uses the PCAP API to capture PTP network traffic. If you are using a hot-pluggable network adapter, i.e. a USB network adapter, the API might need a reboot of your OS to be able to detect the new device. If your device is not hot-pluggable or does still not show up after a reboot, it is most likely that the OS, the PCAP API, or the appropriate driver do not support capturing on that particular device. PTP Track Hound will not be able to capture on that device and the same applies to Wireshark.

This might be because the traffic you want to analyze is PTP unicast traffic between two ports and will therefore not necessarily appear on your monitoring ports. Only broadcast and multicast traffic will be sent to all ports. Anyway, if you want to see unicast traffic in PTP Track Hound, you can either use a network tap, an ethernet hub or configure a port mirroring on your manageable switch.