CHAPTER 11 SECURING REPORTSManagement Server, in that it can listen to traffic that is destined only for the machine on which it is
executed. Network Monitor is not installed with Windows by default, though. You can add it post-
installation through the Add/Remove Programs applet. In this applet, select Add Remove Windows
Components and then Management and Monitoring Tools. If you are unable to install from this point,
you can always download the application from the Microsoft website. We will be using the newest
version of this tool at the time of this writing, version 3.4.
On the SSRS server, we will show how to launch Network Monitor from Administrative Tools. If
more than one network interface card (NIC) is installed on your machine, as in our case, make sure that
you select the card on which you will be testing. Figure 11-1 shows the main screen of Network Monitor
and the traffic that it is capturing on the network, including broadcasts and local packets. Network
Monitor can be daunting to the uninitiated, as it was designed to be used by network administrators who
have more than a cursory understanding of network protocols.
Figure 11-1. Network Monitor
You can filter out any unwanted traffic in the display, which we will cover in this section because we
will be showing how to capture SSRS web data. For our example, we want to see only HTTP traffic on
port 80. We will be running this directly on the client machine that accesses the report, for simplicity
sake. There may be, and will be, plenty of other traffic that we don’t want to see in the monitor, so we
will utilize the filtering capabilities to weed out the unwanted data. You could, for example, define a
capture filter that uses a pattern match in the data packet to limit the results of the capture.
Alternatively, you could capture everything and then configure a display filter to limit the results. In our