# google/stenographer

Stenographer is a packet capture solution which aims to quickly spool all packets to disk, then provide simple, fast access to subsets of those packets.  Discussion/announcements at stenographer@googlegroups.com

Repository: https://github.com/google/stenographer
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/stenographer
Language: Go
License: Apache-2.0
License Family: permissive
Archived: true
Last push: 2021-07-26T14:40:13+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 10/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 0, release rhythm 35, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 4342, "days_push": 1864, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: no_releases, archived
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 1796, forks 233 (observed 2026-08-28T04:05:37.567315+00:00)

## What it is
Stenographer is a high-performance full-packet-capture utility that spools network packets to disk at up to ~10Gbps and manages disk usage by deleting the oldest files. It provides a simple BPF-like query language with time filters for quickly retrieving small subsets of captured packets.

## Use cases
- capture all network traffic to disk for incident response
- buffer packets for intrusion detection analysis
- quickly retrieve specific packets from a large capture history
- query captured packets by IP, port, protocol, and time range
- retain as much packet history as disk allows with automatic rotation
- investigate a security incident after the fact with full packet data

## When to choose
- you need full-packet capture at high throughput for forensics or IDS
- you only need to read back a small fraction (<1%) of captured packets
- you want automatic disk management with rolling deletion of old captures
- you prefer a simple BPF-subset query language with time filters

## When to avoid
- you need complex packet processing like TCP stream reassembly
- you need to read back large portions of captured traffic
- you need real-time packet analysis or deep protocol inspection
- you need a tool that runs on non-Linux platforms

## Facets
- artifact type: cli-tool
- maturity: maintenance
- function: monitoring, security, search-engine, cli
- domain: security, networking, developer-tools
- platform: go, cli
- tags: packet-capture, full-packet-capture, pcap, network-forensics, incident-response, intrusion-detection, bpf-query, disk-buffering, command-line, linux

## Member repositories
- google/stenographer (main) score 10

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:05:37.567315+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T03:22:49.113028+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/google/stenographer (fetched 2026-08-28T04:05:37.567315+00:00, sha c8abd2bd6ad8)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.