Hotwire leverages the wireshark and tshark infrastructure to capture traffic and explore the contents of tcpdump files, but displays the data in a more focused way than wireshark. Hotwire supports only a few protocols (currently PostgreSQL, HTTP and HTTP2), but for these protocols it offers a high-level, clear display of the network traffic, tailored for each specific protocol.

Hotwire can open tcpdump files or record traffic.