nrf5 SDK equivalent of ncs/zephyr bt_monitor

RE: nrf5 SDK equivalent of ncs/zephyr bt_monitor

Hung Bui — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 10:52:30 GMT

Hi Michael,
Thanks for the tip. Seems like an interesting tool. I haven't tried by it but from what I can see in the documentation seem that it would only be able to capture the BLE events reported by the softdevice to the application, not the full HCI communication:

Connection events — LE Connection Complete, Disconnect, Connection Update
PHY management — LE Set PHY, LE PHY Update Complete
Advertising — LE Advertising Report with AD structure decoding (device name, flags, UUIDs, TX power)
ATT/GATT operations — Write Request, Read Response, Notifications, MTU Exchange
Encryption — Encryption Change, Long Term Key Request
Command Complete — Read BD ADDR, Read Local Version, Read Buffer Size

But I think with these it's already very useful.

RE: nrf5 SDK equivalent of ncs/zephyr bt_monitor

michael01 — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:02:36 GMT

Thanks Hung. Someone made a really cool tool (https://github.com/NovelBits/logscope) and I was trying to see how much support the old nrf 5 SDK can provide here. With NCS you can see RTT and BLE events, and even export to wireshark.

RE: nrf5 SDK equivalent of ncs/zephyr bt_monitor

Hung Bui — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 12:47:30 GMT

Hi Michael,
As far as I know there is no equivalent to bt_monitor that you can monitor the HCI communications.

In nRF5 SDK the host and the controller is encapsulated inside the softdevice and we don't provide logging between these layers to the application.

You can register an observer (NRF_SDH_BLE_OBSERVER) but it only provides a limited BLE events to the application.

Best way, in my opinion, to debug BLE application in nRF5 SDK is to use a nRF Sniffer.