What your organisation gets
SharkFest is built for the people who run, defend, and instrument networks — not for vendors. Here's what comes back to your team when one of its members spends a week in Brussels.
Hands-on packet skills returned to the team
Deep-dive sessions on Wireshark internals, encrypted-traffic analysis, and high-speed capture. Attendees come back with skills they apply on Monday — incident response, performance tuning, dissector work.
Direct access to the Wireshark core developers
The maintainers who write the dissectors are in the hallways and at the tables. Bring your toughest packet captures and your hardest questions — this is the room where they get answered.
Vendor-neutral, practitioner-led content
No paid keynotes, no sponsored content disguised as talks. Every session is reviewed for practical value to the network and security community.
Recordings compound the investment
Most sessions are recorded and published to the Wireshark YouTube channel after the conference. One ticket benefits the whole team via internal viewing sessions and brown-bags.
A focused European programme
Five days in Brussels with a 3-day conference programme plus optional pre-conference deep-dive classes — under one roof, no commute, easy rail/air access from across Europe.
Certification on site
The Wireshark Certified Network Analyst exam can be sat during the conference. Verified skills, on the company record, in the same trip.
Request letter — copy & adapt
Below is a draft you can send to your manager. Replace the bracketed placeholders with your specifics — projects you support, recent incidents you would have resolved faster, sessions you intend to attend.
Hi [Manager],
I'd like to attend SharkFest'26 EUROPE in Brussels from 2–6 November 2026. SharkFest is the Wireshark Foundation's annual European developer-and-user conference — the only event of its kind focused specifically on packet analysis, network forensics, and the tooling around them.
I work with Wireshark on [list 2–3 of: incident response, performance investigations, application debugging, dissector work, security monitoring] for our [team / project / customer base]. The conference programme covers exactly the techniques that improve our depth on those tasks — including [pick 2–3 of: encrypted-traffic analysis, high-speed capture tuning, protocol dissector development, decryption workflows, capture fabric design].
Here's the breakdown of what attending provides for the team:
- Three days of intensive, vendor-neutral technical content.
- Direct contact with the Wireshark core developers.
- Recorded sessions I can share internally so the whole team benefits, not just me.
- Option to sit the Wireshark Certified Network Analyst exam on site, verifying my skills on the company record.
The total cost is approximately [€X] — see the breakdown below. I'll prepare a short internal write-up and a session list for the team when I return.
Happy to discuss any of this in our next 1:1.
Thanks,
[Your name]
Cost breakdown
Concrete numbers to drop into your request. Pre-conference classes are optional; the host-hotel group rate is the lowest you'll find in walking distance of the venue.
See the registration page for current early-bird pricing and the lodging page for the group-rate booking link.
Three closing arguments
- Wireshark is already in production in every network team — sharpening that team's depth on it pays for itself the first time an incident is resolved in hours instead of days.
- SharkFest's content is mostly impossible to reproduce internally: it's built on direct contact with the maintainers and on captures, war stories, and tooling shared by peer practitioners.
- The Foundation runs the event as a non-profit. The fee covers the conference itself, not vendor marketing — every euro funds technical content and the open-source project.
Got approval?
Lock in your seat at the early-bird rate before it closes.
