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tutorials

Introducing ntop Professional Training Service

Many of you are asking professional training, in particular in companies and large installations. Over the years we have produced many software applications that allow you to improve network visibility and block cybersecurity threats. In this over increasing ecosystem, we acknowledge that blog posts and webinars might not be sufficient for everyone. For this reason we have created a professional training service designed for people who want to master ntop products in their daily activities. The idea is to divide the training in 5 session of 90 minutes each, so …
Webinar

October 7th: Webinar on ntopng 5.0. You’re invited !

This is to invite you to the webinar about ntopng 5.0 released this summer. The idea is to walk through the new features and possibilities offered by this version. We hope to see you all ! Webinar Content ntopng was initially designed as a tool for real-time network traffic monitoring, with the release 5.0. we have started its transition from monitoring to an AIOps tool. We wanted to make it more accessible and intelligent, able to analyze network metrics in real-time and collapse tens or even thousands of metrics into …
ntopng

HowTo Monitor Traffic in SMEs and Home Networks: A Primer

In the first part of this series of articles, we focused on monitoring ISPs and MSP traffic. Today we analyse network traffic in SMEs and home networks. The typical network layout of a home or a small business is depicted below.   The ISP provides a router for connecting to the Internet (e.g. xDSL or fibre) that usually also features an embedded access point used by phones, tablets or laptops to connect to the Internet. In order to monitor LAN traffic, the best solution is to replace the current switch …
nProbe

How To Configure Flow and Packet Deduplication in nProbe

Sometimes traffic monitoring requires data deduplication as due to topology or hardware constraints there are some network traffic activities that are monitored by multiple devices, and others that are monitored only by a single device. This means that unless some corrections are configured, traffic measurements are wrong and thus useless. Fortunately, we have implemented some features that allows you to avoid this problem by discarding duplicated traffic before this hits the collector. This is because the collector is overwhelmed by the various activities it has to carry on, so it …
nProbe

HowTo Monitor Customer Traffic in Managed Service Providers and ISPs

ISPs have provided Internet access to customers for years and the only goal was to connect their users to the Internet. Managed Service Providers (MSP) and Managed Security Service Providers (MSSP) deliver network, services and infrastructure on customer premises and have become relatively popular in the past few years. Over time customers started to ask new services, including traffic monitoring, security (here MSSP come into the scene) and visibility. So if you as a MSP, MSSP or ISP and you are wondering how to monitor customer traffic using ntop tools, …
Announce

ntopng 5.0 Is Out: Modern Traffic Monitoring for AIOps and Cybersecurity

ntopng was initially designed as a tool for realtime network traffic monitoring. The idea was to create a DPI-based tool able to report traffic statistics. Overtime we have added the ability to implement active monitoring checks, SNMP, and various other features. However there was a fundamental point that was missing: go beyond traffic reporting, moving towards traffic analysis. The current Grafana-like trend of having several large screens full of dashboards is the opposite of what we believe we should do. This approach requires network and security administrators to be trained …
nDPI

Configuring nDPI Flow Risk Exceptions

One of the newest features of nDPI 4 is the ability to identify flow risks. Unfortunately sometimes you need to add exceptions as some of those risks, while correct, need to be ignored. Examples include: An old device that is speaking an outdate TLS version but that you cannot upgrade, and that you have done your best to protect. A host name that looks like a DGA but that it isn’t. A service running on a non-standard port but that works perfectly as is. In order to address the need …
ntopng

Infrastructure Monitoring: Observing The Health and Status of Multiple ntopng Instances

Introduction Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Juvenal). In other words: who will guard the guards themselves? If you use ntopng to monitor your network, you also need to make sure ntopng is monitored as in case of failure, ntopng will not report any alert, and the network administrator can interpret that as a sign of good health, instead of interpreting it as lack of monitoring.Recent 4.3+ versions of ntopng have the capability to monitor other ntopng instances, being them in the same local LAN or physically/geographically distributed. This capability, also referred …
nProbe

nProbe 9.6 Released: IPS, ClickHouse, Observation Points, FreeBSD Support

This is to announce the release of nProbe 9.6 whose main features include: Support of IPS (Intrusion Prevention System) mode. Added support of high-capacity ClickHouse database enabling nProbe to dump ~125k Fps to database. Implemented the concept of Observation Point to enable distributed collection labelling. Added support for collecting and generating flows using Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) flow logs. Out of the box native FreeBSD/OPNsense/pfSense support. Support of traffic directions in collected traffic. Transparent VM systemId support to implement persistent systemId during VM migrations. Added companion tool nprobe-config for …
nDPI

Introducing nDPI 4.0: DPI for CyberSecurity and Traffic Analysis

This is to announce nDPI 4.0. With this new stable release we have extended the scope of nDPI that was originally conceived as a toolkit for detecting application protocols. nDPI is now a modern library for packet processing that in addition to DPI it includes self-contained, efficient (both in memory and processing speed) streaming versions of popular algorithms for data analysis including: Data Forecasting and Anomaly Detection Single, Double, Triple (Holt-Winters) Exponential Smoothing RSI (Relative Strength Index) Data Binning, Clustering, and Similarity Evaluation Network Data Analysis Jitter Entropy GeoIP Data …
nProbe

Collecting Flows from Hundred of Routers Using Observation Points

Collecting flows on large networks with hundred of routers can be challenging. Beside the number of flows to be collected, another key point is to be able to visualize the informations in a simple yet effective way. ntopng allows you to create up to 32 virtual flow collection interfaces that can be used to avoid merging collected flows: unfortunately they are not enough when collecting flows from 100+ routers. In the latest ntopng and nProbe dev versions (soon to become stable), we have implemented the concept of observation point, that …
nProbe

NetFlow/IPFIX At Scale: Comparing nProbe/ClickHouse vs nProbe/ntopng

In our previous post we have analysed the performance of the pipeline nProbe+ntopng for those who need to collect flows and analyse them, trigger alerts, create timeseries, provide a realtime monitoring console, dump them to nIndex and inform remote recipients in case of some problem is detected. This is the main difference between the ntop solution and a NetFlow collector whose main goal is to dump flows on a database with any or little flow analysis. In essence the current state of the art with 4 nProbe instances sending data …