Inspect Network Traffic with Network Profiler

The Network Profiler displays realtime network activity on a timeline, showing data sent and received, as well as the current number of connections. This lets you examine how and when your app transfers data, and optimize the underlying code appropriately.

To open the Network Profiler, follow these steps:

1. Click View > Tool Windows > Android Profiler (you can also click Android Profiler in the toolbar).
2. Select the device and app process you want to profile from the Android Profiler toolbar. If you've connected a device over USB but don't see it listed, ensure that you have enabled USB debugging.
3. Click anywhere in the NETWORK timeline to open the Network Profiler.

Why you should profile your app's network activity

When your app makes a request to the network, the device must use the power-hungry mobile or WiFi radios to send and receive packets. The radios not only use power to transfer data, but also use extra power to turn on and to stay awake.

Using the Network Profiler, you can look for frequent, short spikes of network activity, which mean that your app requires the radios to turn on frequently, or to stay awake for long periods to handle many short requests close together. This pattern indicates that you may be able to optimize your app for improved battery performance by batching network requests, thereby reducing the number of times the radios must turn on to send or receive data. This also allows the radios to switch into low-power mode to save battery in the longer gaps between batched requests.

For more information about techniques to optimize your app's network activity, read Reducing Network Battery Drain.

Network Profiler overview

At the top of the window, you can see the event timeline and 1 radio power state (high/low) vs Wi-Fi. On the timeline, you can 2 click and drag to select a portion of the timeline to inspect the traffic. The 3 window below then shows files sent and received during the selected portion of the timeline, including file name, size, type, status, and time. You can sort this list by clicking any of the column headers. You also see a detailed breakdown of the selected portion of the timeline, showing when each file was sent or received.

Click a connection's name to view 4 detailed information about a selected file sent or received. Click the tabs to view the response data, header information, or the call stack.

Figure 1. The Network Profiler window

Note: You must enable advanced profiling to select a portion of the timeline to inspect, view a list of the files sent and received, or view detailed information about a selected file sent or received. To enable advanced profiling, see Enable advanced profiling.

Network connection troubleshooting

If the Network Profiler detects traffic values, but cannot identify any supported network requests, you will receive the following error message:

"Network Profiling Data Unavailable: There is no information for the network traffic you've selected."

Currently, the Network Profiler only supports the HttpURLConnection and OkHttp libraries for network connections. If your app uses another network connection library, you may not be able to view your network activity in the Network Profiler. If you have received this error message, but your app does use HttpURLConnection or OkHttp, please report a bug so we can investigate the issue. If you would like us to consider support for another specific library in a future release, please search the issue tracker for an open feature request to support the library (or create a new bug if one does not already exist) and chime in so we can gauge demand.