If your using a non-GUI connection or console you can use tcpvcon.exe to dump the same output to a console. It also shows you the process that is making or attempting to make the connection. While netstat will work in a pinch, TCPView is really nice in that it will show you connections just opened (highlighted in green) and connections that are just closed (highlighted in red). The TCPView download includes Tcpvcon, a command-line version with the same functionality. TCPView provides a more informative and conveniently presented subset of the Netstat program that ships with Windows. On Windows Server 2008, Vista, NT, 2000 and XP TCPView also reports the name of the process that owns the endpoint. TCPView is a Windows program that will show you detailed listings of all TCP and UDP endpoints on your system, including the local and remote addresses and state of TCP connections. I’d like to focus on just one of those utilities, TCPView for Windows v2.53. They include a large number of utilities for all areas of system administration.

One set of tools that I’ve found invaluable is Microsoft’s Windows Sysinternals. In this day and age network problems usually require me to look at everything in the picture including the source and destination device which is usually a Windows PC or server.

Tcpview xp