Tunneled monitoring service and method

A system to monitor network communications, comprising:

• a mobile computing device comprising a control circuit and memory coupled with the control circuit and computer instructions that when executed by the control circuit cause the control circuit to implement:
• a tunneled monitoring service (TMS) operated local on the mobile computing device;
• and
• a tunnel protocol within the mobile computing device that is configured to establish a tunnel interface between software applications operating on the mobile computing device and the TMS,
• wherein the tunnel interface is configured to collect and monitor input and output data transactions, communicated by the software applications and intended to be externally communicated from the mobile computing device over a distributed communication network, and direct the input and output data transactions to the TMS;
• wherein the TMS is configured to initiate a monitoring the content of each input and output data transaction relative to predefined criteria to identify relevant parameter information, obtained from one or more of the input and output data transactions, that have a predefined relationship with one or more of the criteria, and
• cause results of the monitoring relative to the criteria to be recorded and provided to one or more remote servers,
• wherein the TMS is further configured to:
• open, local on the mobile computing device, raw data packets of the output data transactions from the tunnel interface and to perform monitoring and re-packetizing of the payloads of said data packets prior to any encryption or transmission to an external server;
• cause the re-packetized data packets to be communicated from the computing device directly to one or more intended external computing servers, without routing through a centralized VPN server;
• cause a re-packetizing of a payload of each of the data packets producing re-packetized input data packets;
• cause the re-packetized input data packets to be internally communicated from the mobile computing device and over the communication network to one or more intended external computing servers;
• receive input data transactions comprising input data packets from at least one of the one or more external computing servers and directed to the TMS in response to the communication of the re-packetized data packets;
• and
• initiate a monitoring of each of the input and output data packets relative to the criteria to identify relevant parameter information from one or more of the input data packets that have a predefined relationship with one or more of the criteria, and cause the results of the monitoring relative to the criteria to be recorded.