How to use wireshark to determine network traffic in my plant bus network (PLC)

Hi Experts,

Any manual or steps on how to use the Wireshark app to determine the network traffic on our plant bus network? I'm having an issue with a slow response when opening a faceplate on my WinCC. I also used WinCC channel diagnosis to check on my request queue size, when opening a faceplate. It took 8-13 seconds to open.

Thanks in advance

The Wireshark application captures the traffic between the HMI and the PLC, provided it is running on the same PC as the HMI. If not, you have to use a port mirroring switch. Wireshark can additionally do things like filtering let's say traffic between two IP addresses. There are tools for showing time differences between packets. It depends on what you want to analize. If you post a trace I can have a look at it.

Whireshark will show you the content of the packets but apparently you have a latency problem and it will be more useful to ping different IPs on the network to know where the delay is, mainly to ping the IPs of the devices whose data is shown on that WinCC screen which takes a long time to load

Are there devices connected by WiFi?

If you only want to analyze the WinCC communication, I'd install wireshark on the same machine. But you need a little bit of understanding of the protocol which is used, I had to fix a similar problem on a customers WinCC project with a S7-300, where the main problem was the bad design on some C scripts. But at some point you can't optimize anymore, for example a S7-300 with an Ethernet CP is slow by design because the slow backplane bus it's using to get the data from the CPU.