Author: admin

ntop

Introducing @ntop_community Telegram Group

While tools like github and mailing lists can serve developers and experts, sometimes people look for a quick help. For this reason we have create a new Telegram group called @ntop_community that you can use (even from your desktop and mobile) for asking quick help from the community. If you are a ntopng user you can select the “Help and News” menu entry for jumping to the telegram channel. We invite people to join and help supporting other users, as well send us feedback. Thank you! …
nProbe

Introducing per-Second Measurements in nProbe Flow Exports

The need to perform on-time and per-second traffic measurements clashes with protocols such as NetFlow where all counters are cumulative with respect to the flow lifetime. So if you have a flow that lasted 2 minutes and moved X bytes, you have no clue what was the throughput of this flow across the 2 minutes. For this reason people started to shorten flow duration with the drawback of putting a lot of pressure on probes as well to increase the disk space and flow records cardinality on collectors. In essence …
ntopng

ntopng and Time Series: From RRD to InfluxDB, new charts with Time Shift

One of the main concern of our users is the ability to scale ntopng with a large number of hosts/protocols and hence how to scale time series. As already discussed, RRD has many limitations with the increase of number of time series, hence it was time to start exploring new paths. We decided to abstract the ntopng engine from RRD and thus open up the engine to new time series databases. This has enabled us to use InfluxDB to store time series instead of RRD, that (as already discussed) enabled …
ntop

Cloud, IoT, sFlow Traffic Monitoring Tutorials #SFUS18

Last week we have presented two tutorials at the Sharkfest US 2018 edition: sFlow: Theory and practice of a sampling technology [ slides ] Packet monitoring in the days of IoT and Cloud [ slides ] We believe these tutorials are interesting for all those who are using ntop (and non ntop tools) and are willing to learn more about sFlow and traffic monitoring in cloud and IoT environments. Enjoy! …
ntop

Network Traffic and Security Monitoring Using ntopng and InfluxDB

Yesterday our friends at InfluxData organised a meetup at their HQ in San Francisco, CA. For all those who have been unable to attend the event, these are the presentation slides so you can learn more about the transition from RRD to InfluxDB that is happening in ntopng. Please do not forget to provide feedback on the ntop mailing list or on github. Thank you ! …
Announce

Introducing ntopng Edge (nEdge): Monitoring, Service Segmentation and Security for the Network Edge

The network edge, either wired or wireless, is becoming increasingly important as most things now happen there being the place where devices are deployed. Security-wise, central firewalls are too far from the edge, and thus devices can roam freely – and potentially create troubles – in LANs without ever hitting a security device. The consequence is that LANs are becoming increasingly insecure, and the cloud is complicating all of this as it provides in encrypted connections – that are not inspectable by monitoring and security applications – the perfect ingredients …
ntopng

Learning the ntopng Lua API

ntopng is open source, that means you can read its code and modify it according to the GPL license. The current ntopng architecture is based on three layers where the top one is written in Lua and it is used to render the web interface as well to execute periodic activities. In essence the C++/Lua API is a clean way to interact and extend ntopng without having to code in C++. So far we have used this API inside the ntop team without documenting it. This has been a mistake …
n2n

Using n2n to Steer your Internet Traffic and Circumvent Restrictions

Suppose that you are travelling abroad and you need to access some Internet sites that are not available abroad. Or suppose that you want to evade the restrictions of your ISP, of the hotel room where you are currently staying, or the WiFi hotspot you are using for connecting to the Internet. The simplest thing to do is to open a VPN and you’re done. However VPNs are not very flexible and they require a single place where everybody meet and great. n2n instead is based on the peer-to-peer paradigm …
Announce

You’re Invited to the “Monitoring with Time Series” Meetup: San Francisco June 27th

Hi all this is to invite all of you living in San Francisco and in the Bay Area to attend the “Monitoring with Time Series” meetup organised by our friends at InfluxData. I will be speaking about ntop, traffic monitoring, time series and InfluxDB. It will also be a good time to meet with our users, hear suggestions, and (perhaps) complains. The Internet is a nice place, but a physical meeting has no price. The meetup will take place at InfluxData HQ, 799 Market St Suite 400, San Francisco. The …
ntopng

Best Practices to Secure ntopng

After a fresh install, ntopng will run using a default, basic configuration. Such configuration is meant to provide an up-and-running ntopng but does not try to secure it. Therefore, the default configuration should only be used for testing purposes in non-production environments. Several things are required to secure ntopng and make it enterprise-proof. Those things include, but are not limited to, enabling an encrypted web access, restricting the web server access, and protecting the Redis server used by ntopng as a cache. Here is the list of things required to …
n2n

n2n is back !

Hi all, it is finally time to restart development activities in n2n whose code is available at https://github.com/ntop/n2n. The advent of the cloud, privacy concerns on the Internet, mobile users now producing a large amount of Internet traffic, require a secure network overlay such as n2n to build upon. Initially designed to solve our connectivity issues created by NATs, we believe it is now time to refresh it and serve modern user needs. The first activity we would like to do is to merge back in the n2n repository all …
ntopng

How ntop built a web-based traffic analysis and flow collection with InfluxDB

A couple of days ago InfluxData hosted a ntop webinar about how we have integrated InfluxDB into ntopng. Those who have not attended it can give a look at the presentation slides as well watch the webinar. In essence: ntopng is based on RRD for timeseries As networks grow, ntopng needs to store more time series more granular. RRD is file based, that is a good things as configuration is minimal, but it does not scale on mid/large networks. We need an alternative, and found InfluxDB to be the best option …