Serial Monitor

Serial Monitor provides a comprehensive solution for all your serial communication needs. By offering features like detailed logging, flexible data views, and advanced analysis tools, Serial Monitor ensures you have complete control and understanding of your serial data. It simplifies troubleshooting, accelerates debugging, and empowers users to tackle even the most complex serial challenges.

Capabilities

Required

org.jancy.io.devmon

Required for monitoring app-to-kernel interactions. Enables the Serial Monitor, which can be used to sniff applications on the user’s PC talking to serial devices.

Recommended

org.jancy.io.serial	Required for establishing serial links.
com.ioninja.layer	Enables attaching layers (such as Modbus Analyzer) to serial sessions.

Optional

org.jancy.io.ssh	Required for establishing serial connections over SSH.
com.ioninja.log-regex-markup	Enables the regex-based markup of serial binary data in the log.

Basic Setup

1. Ensure Tibbo Device Monitor is installed

Serial Monitor uses the Device Monitor service, consisting of a kernel-mode module intercepting requests from applications to the specified devices and a user-mode configuration utility.

Installation and proper configuration of the Device Monitor service are sometimes stumbling points for users. Please follow these knowledge base articles for more information:

• Installation of Tibbo Device Monitor on Windows

• Configuring Permissions in Tibbo Device Monitor on Windows

• Installation of Tibbo Device Monitor on Linux

• Configuring Permissions in Tibbo Device Monitor on Linux

2. In IO Ninja, click the “New Session” dropdown and select a new “Serial Monitor” session

3. If not selected automatically, select your serial device from the “Port:” dropdown

4. Click the “Capture” button on the far right of the filter bar.

If you encounter an “Access is denied” error, please refer to our knowledge base.

5. View the serial communication in the Serial Monitor window.

6. Adjust settings as needed via the “Settings” button (see “Settings” section below for details)

Settings

Setting	Description	Default
Port	Specify a serial port to monitor. You can either (a) pick a port from the combo box (which should contain all serial ports detected on your machine) or (b) type the device name directly.
Read parallelism (Windows-only)	Maximum number of read requests to submit to tdevmon at the same time. Having more than one pending read at a time helps prevent notification loss in IO-intensive scenarios (after filling one user buffer, tdevmon can immediately switch to the next one without any waiting). Increasing this number beyond 4 usually won’t yield any extra gains.	4
Read block size (B)	The size of each individual read block submitted to tdevmon.	4KB
RX buffer size (B)	The full size of the incoming data (RX) buffer. Affects read throughput.	16KB
RX buffer full notifications	Toggle warnings in log about the incoming data (RX) buffer getting full.	off
Pending notification limit	The size of the tdevmon kernel buffer. Exceeding notifications will be dropped. Important note – setting this value too high will waste the precious kernel memory. Only increase it when necessary, e.g., to combat data loss.	1MB
Serial setting changes	Toggle notifications about serial setting (baud rate, data size, parity, stop bits, flow control) changes in the log.	on
DTR/RTS changes	Toggle notifications about control line (DTR, RTS) changes in the log.	on
DSR/CTS/DCD/RI changes	Toggle notifications about status line (DSR, CTS, DCD, RI) changes in the log.	on
Serial line errors	Toggle warning about serial line errors (PARITY, FRAMING and BREAK) in the log.	on

---

See Also

• Serial Monitor Product Page