USB Monitor
Capture Low-Level USB CommunicationsOS: Windows, Linux
USB plays a crucial role in modern computing, enabling data transfer and interaction between various devices and applications. USB Monitor allows users to capture and inspect low-level USB interactions initiated by other applications on their PC. This capability is essential for tasks such as debugging USB device behavior, reverse-engineering vendor-specific USB protocols, and developing custom USB devices and drivers.
By capturing raw USB data, USB Monitor provides insight into how applications communicate with USB hardware. This can help developers understand protocol details, troubleshoot unexpected behavior, and verify the correctness of data transmission.
Why USB Monitor?
Low-Level Monitoring
USB Monitor records all types of USB activity, capturing communication at a low level to help users diagnose issues and analyze proprietary protocols. By reviewing USB traffic logs, users can identify patterns in device communication, such as how a device responds to specific commands, the timing and frequency of data transfers, and any errors or unexpected behaviors. This level of analysis is essential for debugging device drivers, optimizing data handling, and ensuring compliance.
Clear and Continuous Data Representation
USB Monitor excels at representing USB transfers with clarity. When multiple transfers belong to the same logical data stream, such as consecutive bulk transfers on a single endpoint, IO Ninja merges them into one continuous stream of bytes. This unified view makes it far easier to follow the data conversation and analyze the protocol without the hassle of piecing together separate start and end records, like with other tools. The result is a cleaner and more intuitive representation that helps you quickly pinpoint and troubleshoot communication issues.
Detailed Information for All Available Devices
USB Monitor provides detailed information on all available USB devices. By hovering over an option on the dropdown menu, you can see details about the device. The same information is also printed at the start of the log when you begin a new capture.
Powerful & Beautiful Logging Engine
The Ninja Scroll logging engine is the heart of IO Ninja! It offers many unique and useful features you won't find in other USB monitors, such as interleaving binary data with informational messages for a clear timeline of events, switching between hex-view and plain-text view of binary data, a regex markup engine for highlighting data based on regular expressions, and many others!
Enabling USB Monitoring
On Windows, USB Monitor requires the USBPcap capture driver. USBPcap is bundled with the full IO Ninja .msi installers, so if you installed IO Ninja this way, you are set. However, if you installed IO Ninja from a core .msi installer or a portable .7z package, you must install USBPcap from its official website manually.
On Linux, USB Monitor depends on usbmon, therefore you need to manually enable it to use the plugin.
Getting Started
Step 1. Start a Session
Begin by launching a USB Monitor session.
Ensure USBPcap is installed if you are on Windows, or that usbmon is enabled if you are on Linux.
Step 2. Select a Device
From the "Device:" dropdown menu, select the USB device you want to monitor.
Step 3. Start Monitoring
Click the "Capture" button, to the right of the device selection dropdown.
Step 4. Analyze Incoming USB Traffic
Analyze the log as USB traffic is intercepted.
Documentation
| Resource |
|---|
| USB Monitor Documentation in the IO Ninja User Manual |
| Installation of USBPcap on Windows |
| Installation of usbmon on Linux |
See Also
| Plugin | Relevance |
|---|---|
 HID Terminal | Allows low-level interactions with HID devices. |
 USB Endpoint Terminal | Allows low-level interactions with endpoints on any USB device. |
 HID Monitor | Allows capturing low-level communications on any HID device. |
Gallery
