Android emulator: How to monitor network traffic?

Question

There are two ways to capture network traffic directly from an Android emulator:

1. Copy and run an ARM-compatible tcpdump binary on the emulator, writing output to the SD card, perhaps (e.g. tcpdump -s0 -w /sdcard/emulator.cap).

2. Run emulator -tcpdump emulator.cap -avd my_avd to write all the emulator's traffic to a local file on your PC

In both cases you can then analyse the pcap file with tcpdump or Wireshark as normal.

It is also possible to use http proxy to monitor http requests from emulator. You can pass -http-proxy flag when starting a new emulator to set proxy (Example burp) to monitor Android traffic. Example usage ./emulator -http-proxy localhost:8080 -avd android2.2. Note that in my example I'm using Burp, and it is listening port 8080. More info can be found here.

For OS X you can use Charles, it's simple and easy to use.

For more information, please have a look at Android Emulator and Charles Proxy blog post.

Yes, wireshark will work.

I don't think there is any easy way to filter out solely emulator traffic, since it is coming from the same src IP.

Perhaps the best way would be to set up a very bare VMware environment and only run the emulator in there, at least that way there wouldn't be too much background traffic.