Author: admin

ntopng

Understanding Timeseries Throughput Calculation

ntopng creates timeseries for traffic by periodically (e.g. every minute) writing into RRD/Influx the traffic volume observed. Below you can see an example. Traffic is used to keep track of the data volume exchanged. Over time timeseries are aggregated (roll-up) to save space, meaning for instance that 60 minute observations are used to compute a hourly observation. A timeseries rollup involves summarising the original time series data over larger time intervals. The purpose of doing a rollup is to reduce the volume of data and make it more manageable while …
ntopng

HowTo Trigger an Alert When Contacting a Website/IP with ntopng

ntopng has native blacklist support that enables generation of alerts when malware sites are contacted. You can enable/disable the list of active blacklist by accessing the blacklist page from the preferences menu of the left sidebar and also configure the list properties such as refresh rate as well enable/disable them. Now suppose you want to trigger an alert when contacting a specific IP address or a website (this regardless if using clear-text protocol such as HTTP or encrypted TLS-based communications). How can you do that? See it below: Define a …
Announce

ntopConf 2023 (25 years of ntop) Registration is Now Open

This is to announce that the registration for the ntop Conference 2023, 25 years since the first release of ntop, is now open. Similar to past conferences, this event is divided into two days: the first day will be allocated for training on ntop products, the second day for the main conference and workshop. You can read the conference and training agenda at the ntopConf 2023 page from which you can also reserve your seat. Finally a few notes. In order to make this event effective we have decided that: …
nProbe

Monitoring Microsoft Teams Performance and Video/Call Quality

Months ago we have talked how ntopng identifies ad monitors Zoom calls quality. Today we show how call monitoring has been now seamlessly extended to Microsoft Teams. Thanks to nDPI, ntopng is now able to detect Teams calls and to label them according to the stream type: Video Audio Screen Sharing. For each call it is possible to visualise the stream type as well as the flow statistics. If ntopng collects RTP flows from nProbe it also reports the call quality as exported by nProbe. Both Zoom and Microsoft Teams …
Webinar

Register for ntop June 2023 Webinar: June 20th 3PM CET / 9 AM EST

This is to invite you to the latest ntop webinar before the summer break. The major webinar topic will include n2disk smart packet recorder Latest OT/SCADA Developments; IEC 104 and ModbusTCP Suricata/Zeek IDS Acceleration at 40/100 Gbit New ntopng charts and tables Traffic Rules Inactive Host Monitoring and ,,,, You can register for the webinar at this page: the registration link will be include the instructions for joining the webinar. Hope to see you online ! …
nProbe

Scaling Up ntopng Flow and Packet Processing

As traffic rate increases, it is important to tune packet processing in order to avoid drops and thus educe visibility. This post will show you a few tricks for improving the overall performance and better exploit modern multicore systems. The Problem ntopng packet processing performance depends on the number of ingress pps (packets per second) as well the number of flows/hosts being monitored and number of enabled behavioural checks. With ntopng you can expect to process (your mileage varies according to the CPU/system you are using) a few (< 5) …
ntopng

Introducing Modbus Traffic Monitoring in ntopng

Modbus is an industrial protocol used to communicate with automation devices. The initial protocol version was implemented over a serial layer, whereas the current version named ModbusTCP is a variant of the original protocol running over TCP/IP. This blog post describes how ntopng monitors ModbusTCP traffic: it detects Modbus flows via nDPI and dissects them building an internal flow representation. For each flow, ntopng keeps track of the function codes uses, exceptions and registers accessed.  It also reports the transitions between function Ids and depicts them graphically: the more transitions …
ntopng

OpenAPI: ntopng REST API for Software Developers

Maybe not all of you know that ntopng powers in some popular monitoring systems such as CheckMK and Centreon. The integration is made possible through the ntopng REST API (REST stands for REpresentational State Transfer) that allows developers to manipulate ntopng configuration and query monitored information including hosts, flows, alerts and historical data. Recently we have integrated the ntopng API specified according to OpenAPI into ntopng by using the swagger open-source tool. All you need to do is to update your ntopng (dev) copy and access the embedded REST API …
Cybersecurity

OT, ICS, SCADA: IEC 60870-5-104 in ntopng

What is OT, ICS, SCADA ? Operational Technology (OT) refers to computing systems that are used to manage industrial operations or process operations, like water treatment, electrical power distribution or wrapping a chocolate in foil. ntopng supports some Industrial control systems (ICS) protocol often managed via a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems. Via nDPI it can detect protocols such as Modbus, IEC 60780 or BACnet. In addition to this, ntopng has extensive detection and monitor capabilitiesfor some protocols OT protocols/ ntopng “Generic” Monitoring ntopng is a monitoring tool …
ntop

ntopConf’ 23 Call for Talks is now Open

This year ntop will turn 25. Our call for speakers for the ntop conference 2023 (Pisa, Sept 21-22) is now open. Deadline is June 30th. We want to hear you voice, experience, projects based on ntop tools and anything that can be of interest to our community. Pisa is the conference location that we have selected. It is the ntop hometown, and it can be easily reached with low-cost flights from many international locations.  No excuse for not submitting a talk proposal. Read more and submit your talk at this …
nDPI

Using nDPI to Monitor Streaming, Messaging and Social Network Traffic

We have created nDPI to label network traffic and extract metadata such as the URL or TLS certificate information. nDPI is the layer on top of which ntop applications are sitting. This time we do not want to talk about nDPI internals but rather use it to monitor Internet traffic. For this reason we have taken traffic from an Italian broadband (no mobile) ISP, and used ntopng + nDPI to monitor the Internet traffic produced by residential and business users. Below you can find the results for social networks and …