Many ntop products such as ntopng, nProbe, and PF_RING FT just to name a few are based on network flows. However not all our users know in detail what is a network flow, and how it works in practice. This blog post describes what they are and how they work in practice. What is a […]
nProbe 10.2 is Available: Redesigned Kafka Export, nTap and Google Cloud Support
Today we announce the availability of nProbe 10.2 that features native nTap support for generating flows from remote devices, and redesigned Kafka support for both flow export and communication with ntopng. With this respect, the new –ntopng <URL> command line option will replace in the future –zmq as it allows to both specify if ZMQ […]
Scaling Up: How To Collect, Analyse, and Store Flows at Scale (100 Gbit+)
Most ntop tools such as nProbe cento and n2disk have been designed to run at high speed (today we consider 100 Gbit a high-speed link). ntopng instead has to perform many activities including behavioral traffic analysis that makes it unable to process traffic well above 10 Gbit. In this case you can use nProbe Cento […]
HowTo Monitor Zoom Performance and Video/Call Quality
Zoom is a popular platform for video communications and team collaboration. As many other cloud services, network administrators need to supervise Zoom network traffic usage. DPI toolkits such as nDPI are useful for identifying Zoom traffic for supervising the network bandwidth used by your Zoom calls. Recently we have took advantage of this research work […]
HowTo Deploy nProbe and ntopng on the Cloud
Some of our customers deploy ntopng on the cloud in order to collect flows coming from private nProbe instances often deployed on private networks or clouds. Thanks to ZMQ/Kafka communications, data sent by nProbe to ntopng travel encrypted; this is contrary to many other cloud-based collectors that instead receive clear-text IPFIX/NetFlow flows sent by exporters […]
Howto use Kafka (instead of ZMQ) For Reliable Flow Collection and IPC
Historically, we have used ZMQ for interconnecting nProbe to ntopng, as this is a fast and simple messaging system. However one of they key advantage of ZMQ of being broker-less is sometime a problem. In case of maintenance, traffic peaks, or unreliable communications, the ZMQ communication between nProbe and ntopng will drop flows with the […]
HowTo Implement Flow Relay, Replication and Fanout with nProbe
Sometimes flow (sFlow/NetFlow/IPFIX) collection can become a complicated activity when you need to: Collect, on your private network, flows originated by devices with a public IP. Migrate your infrastructure to nProbe/ntopng while sending flows to both nProbe and your legacy collector. Implementing all this is often an expensive exercise with non-ntop solutions, therefore in order […]
Welcome to nProbe 10: Agent-mode, Timeseries, AWS/Google Cloud, Custom Flow Collection
nProbe 1.0 was introduced in 2002. After 20 years we are glad to introduce nProbe 10 that introduces several new features and improvements: Agent mode for process monitoring on Linux (eBPF) and Windows Implemented timeseries support for nProbe self-monitoring and sFlow-based counter timeseries Conversion of Amazon AWS VPC files into flows Export of flows towards […]
HowTo Use nProbe To Create Traffic Timeseries in InfluxDB
One of the latest additions in nProbe, is the ability to create network traffic timeseries that will be stored in the popular InfluxDB database. This features allows nProbe users to create timeseries that can be depicted and integrated in Grafana dashboard for instance. Timeseries are dumped by means of two new nProbe command line options: […]
HowTo Use TLS for Securing Flow Export/Collection
One of the main limitations of flow-based protocols such as IPFIX and NetFlow is that the traffic is sent in cleartext. This means that it can be observed in transit and that it is pretty simple to send fake flow packets that can then pollute the collected information. As of today, unencrypted protocols need to […]