Elephantshark helps you monitor, understand and troubleshoot Postgres network traffic: that’s Postgres servers, clients, drivers and ORMs talking to Postgres servers, proxies and poolers.

Elephantshark sits between the two parties in a Postgres-protocol exchange, forwarding messages in both directions while parsing and logging them. It is an open-source Ruby script published by Neon and works with any and all Postgres-protocol network traffic. That includes, but isn’t limited to, traffic to and from Neon databases.

https://github.com/neondatabase-labs/elephantshark

Why not just use Wireshark?

Ordinarily Wireshark is great for this kind of thing, but using Wireshark is difficult if a connection is SSL/TLS-encrypted. SSLKEYLOGFILE support was recently merged into libpq, but it won’t be available in a release version for some time. Plus, not all Postgres connections are made with libpq.

To get round this problem, Elephantshark decrypts and re-encrypts a Postgres connection. It then logs and annotates the messages passing through. Or if you prefer to use Wireshark, Elephantshark can enable that too by writing keys to an SSLKEYLOGFILE.

Elephantshark in action

Run elephantshark in one terminal:

% elephantshark
listening ...

In a second terminal, connect to and query a Neon Postgres database via Elephantshark by (1) appending .local.neon.build to the host name and (2) changing channel_binding=require to channel_binding=disable:

% psql 'postgresql://neondb_owner:fake_password@ep-crimson-sound-a8nnh11s.eastus2.azure.neon.tech.local.neon.build/neondb?sslmode=require&channel_binding=disable'
psql (17.5 (Homebrew))
SSL connection (protocol: TLSv1.3, cipher: TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384, compression: off, ALPN: postgresql)
Type "help" for help.

neondb=> SELECT now();
              now
-------------------------------
 2025-07-02 11:51:01.721628+00
(1 row)

neondb=> \q

Back in the first terminal, see what bytes got exchanged:

Get started with Elephantshark

To find out more and/or to install Elephantshark, check out the README on GitHub. You can also find out more about Neon, or sign up today for free.