Author: admin

nProbe

Network Monitoring 101: A Beginner’s Guide to Understanding ntop Tools

The first important step to start with network monitoring is to analyze what we want to monitor and how to deploy the monitoring solution in the existing network. Here are some important questions to ask ourselves before starting the actual monitoring: Do we need to monitor the entire network or just a specific segment? Do we already have network appliances with network flow export capabilities (e.g. NetFlow/sFlow devices)? Can we use port mirroring of a switch or a network TAP? Where are we deploying our network monitoring appliances to get …
ntop

Released nBox 2.6 Now Featuring a New Centralised Manager

This is to introduce a new nBox stable release 2.6, that includes many security enhancements, a reworked services management system to fully support systemd (available on latest CentOS/Ubuntu releases), and the new NxN user interface to monitor the status of all ntop applications running on distributed appliances in a single place and facilitate centralized management. The NxN manager includes a dashboard where you can add your nBox appliances, and it will automatically show all services running on each appliance, including informations like actual processed traffic and disk utilisation. The dashboard also lets …
Announce

Announcing ntopng 3.2 – The First Move Towards Active Network Monitoring

Today we are glad to announce the new 3.2 stable release of ntopng. Among the most important new features available in this release, there is without any doubt an advanced network devices discovery functionality. Historically, ntopng has always been a fully passive monitoring tool. This release aims at complementing the information gathered from a purely passive packet capture with precious extra bits of data obtained by actively searching for devices. Network devices discovery glues together multiple techniques and heuristics, including ARP pinging, SNMP querying, SSDP discovery and MDNS names resolution. …
Announce

nProbe 8.2 stable is out – A Wink At Next-Gen ASA Firewalls

We are pleased to announce that the new 8.2 release of nProbe is out. This release features full Cisco ASA NetFlow support. ASA are industry’s first threat-focused next-generation firewalls that export a rich set of information through NetFlow. Being able to collect ASA data using nProbe will give you an advantage over collectors that only interpret standard NetFlow. Collected data can also be sent to ntopng over ZMQ to actually create a very effective solution for the monitoring and visualization of firewall-generated data. ZMQ-based data export has been greatly improved in …
Announce

Announcing nDPI 2.2

Today we are glad to release nDPI stable version 2.2. This minor release present several fixes and adds support for a handful of new protocols. It also features custom application categories to allow users to create personalized mappings between protocols and categories. The full list of changes introduced with this release are: Main New Features Custom protocol categories to allow personalization of protocols-categories mappings DHCP fingerprinting HTTP User Agent discovery New Supported Protocols and Services ICQ (instant messaging client) YouTube Upload LISP SoundCloud Sony PlayStation Nintendo (switch) gaming protocol Improvements …
ntop

ntop User’s Group Meeting at Shakfest EU 2017

Those who have not been able to attend our ntop meeting at Sharkfest Europe 2017 can find our presentation slides below Sharkfest EU 2017 – Intro Sharkfest EU 2017 – hardware-flow-offload Sharkfest EU 2017 – beautiful monitoring with ntopng and grafana Sharkfest EU 2017 – microprobes Sharkfest EU 2017 – extcap, remote wireshark and demo Sharkfest EU 2017 – EdgeTrafficMonitoring Sharkfest EU 2017 – what’s new, new products and roadmap We need your feedback and we could be glad if our community could give us guidance in the next steps. …
ntopng

Network Device Discovery. Part 1: Active Discovery

Since its introduction in 1998, ntop(ng) has been a pure (well beside DNS address resolution if enabled) passive network monitoring tool. Recently we have complemented it with active device discovery in order to find out if there are silent devices in our network, and what services/OS our devices are featuring. In this article we will analyze how active discovery works, leaving to a future article the analysis of passive discovery. Active discovery can be started on demand from the menu     or from the network preferences to enable periodic …
ntopng

ntopng Grafana Integration: The Beauty of Data Visualizazion

Disclaimer This article is outdated: please see this document for using ntopng with grafana Summary Grafana is one of the most widely known platforms for metrics monitoring (and alerting); ntopng version 3.1 natively integrates with Grafana thanks to a datasource plugin which is freely available; This article explains how to install and configure the ntopng datasource plugin, and how to build a dashboard for the visualization of ntopng-generated metrics. A video tutorial is available as well: Introduction Grafana is an open platform for analytics and visualization. An extremely-well engineered architecture makes …
ntop

You’re Invited to the ntop and Wireshark Users Group Meeting

On November 7th we will be organising the ntop meetup during the Sharkfest EU 2017 that will take place in Portugal. You can find all details here. This year we will be focusing on cybersecurity, IoT and user traffic monitoring, as well on Wireshark. In fact during our talk at Sharkfest we won’t have enough time to explain in detail all our activities for turning (or complementing) Wireshark into an effective monitoring tool and not just a packet dissector. We welcome all users of our community (attendance of Sharkfest EU is …
ntopng

Announcing ntopng and Grafana Integration

Disclaimer This article is outdated: please see this document for using ntopng with grafana This is to announce the release of the ntopng Grafana datasource that you can find on the grafana website. Using this plugin you can create a Grafana dashboard that fetches data from ntopng in a matter of clicks. To set up the datasource visit Grafana Datasources page and select the green button Add a datasource. Select ntopng as the datasource Type in the page that opens. The HTTP url must point to a running ntopng instance, …
ntop

20 Years of ntop and Beyond

This month it’s 20 years that I have started the ntop project. Initially it was a hobby project, willing to understand what was really flowing on a network after having spent 5 years playing with OSI that was clearly a dead end (whoever used FTAM to download a file and compared it with FTP/NFS or drag-and-drop on a Mac desktop, understands what I mean), even for me that just graduated from university. My initial idea behind ntop was to create a simple tool able to enable network visibility without having …