nProbe

Measuring ntopng+nProbe Flow Processing Performance
NOTE: this post is outdated. Latest versions of ntopng and nProbe improve performance significantly. New figures are given in this post. In this post we try to analyze the performance of nProbe and ntopng for the collection of NetFlow. ntopng and nProbe will be broken down into smaller functional units and such units will be analyzed to understand the maximum performance of every single task as well as of the overall collection architecture. The machine used for the analysis is equipped with an 4-core Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1230 v5 @ 3.40GHz …
ntopng

ntopng Disk Requirements for Timeseries and Flows
Being able to do a priori estimations of the space that ntopng is going to use in a production environment is fundamental for the provisioning of the storage. In this post we try to estimate the space used by ntopng to store timeseries and flows. Timeseries The number of timeseries generated by ntopng depends almost exclusively on the number of local hosts. Other timeseries generated, including those for the interfaces or SNMP devices, are generally orders of magnitude less than those generated for local hosts. For this reason, it is …
ntopng

Advanced SNMP Monitoring with ntopng
It has been a while since we have added SNMP support to ntopng. The first release, presented in this blog post, implemented basic SNMP support. Since then we have code various improvements and new feature, with the aim of turning ntopng in an advanced SNMP monitor. Among the extensions we have implemented are the following: A cache to decouple the polling of devices from the browsing of polled data Devices are polled periodically by ntopng with a background task that cycles them at 5-minute intervals and sends polled data to …
Components

Remote ntopng Authentication with RADIUS and LDAP
In large organizations, it is common to have a centralised authentication system usually named AAA (Authentication, Authorization and Accounting). Managing users typically involves the definition and enforcement of the rights to do some operations or to access certain resources in a network. Being able to grant (or deny) such rights using a centralized authentication system is the only viable solution when it comes to dealing with large organizations with hundreds, or even thousands, of users that periodically join and leave. AAA protocols include Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS) and …
n2n

Use Remote Assistance to Connect to ntopng Instances
A problem same ntop users how to face with, is the ability to remote access a ntopng instance running behind a firewall. This can be solved using a VPN or other means that often require to deploy an additional network service. Some of our ntop users are familiar with n2n, an open source peer-to-peer VPN ntop developed and maintains. With n2n in essence is possible to create a network overlay that allows you to access your assets in a secure way, this regardless of your network configuration. For this reason …
nDPI

Traffic Classification Using nDPI over DPDK
Last week we have attended the DPDK Summit North America 2018 and talked about how to use nDPI over DPDK, a kernel-bypass toolkit similar to PF_RING. For those who have not attended the presentation, they can read the presentation slides. As you will be read, nDPI is a cross platform deep packet inspection toolkit able to process about 10 Gbit of traffic with a single core on an Intel E3 CPU. Its code is portable across various architectures, you can use it from user space and kernel (not what we …
nProbe

sFlow Collection and Analysis with nProbe and ntopng
sFlow, short for sampled Flow, is a sampling technology designed to export network devices information, namely: Interface counters (à la SNMP MIB-II); Traffic packets (à la ERSPAN). sFlow agents run on switches, routers, firewalls and other devices, and periodically export interface counters and traffic packets via UDP towards one or more sFlow collectors. sFlow, relying on sampling processes to periodically counters and packets, is scalable and ultra-lightweight and has been embedded into network devices by tens of vendors and manufacturers. Contrary to NetFlow (please note that in sFlow parlance the …
nProbe

Using nProbe for Collecting Ixia IPFIX with IxFlow extensions
Ixia allows to enrich IPFIX records with value-add extensions. Additional information that can be exported, along with standard fields such as source and destination IP addresses, include: Geographical information such as region IP, latitude and city name Application ID or name, device, browser and even SSL cipher used Detail on application and handset (device) type for mobile users HTTP URL and hostname for web activity tracking HTTP and DNS metadata for rapid breach detection Transaction Latency for application performance tracking The latest version of nProbe provides full support for Ixia …
ntop

20 Years of ntop: The Conference
Last Friday Oct 26th, at the University of Pisa we have celebrated 20 years of ntop open source code development and hacking culture. It has been a success with over 110 registered people, and 24 people in the morning training session. We decided to celebrate this event where ntop was created, and where most of the team lives. The idea is to periodically repeat this event  in other locations. The core of these meetings is the community, rather than the core team. The main feedback we received is that people …
nDPI

Promoting Traffic Visibility: from Application Protocols to Traffic Categories in nDPI and ntopng
Often we receive emails asking question like: “how many protocols nDPI supports?”, “how do you position nDPI against commercial DPI toolkit A, B, C?”. Although these questions are reasonable, they do not grasp the significance of DPI. For years commercial toolkits have run the race for protocols: I have 200 protocols, I have 1000 protocols, I have 500. Then asking that is the meaning with the term “protocol” people list traffic from to sites like cnn.com or bbc.co.uk. But BBC is not a protocol but rather some traffic (for instance …
ntopng

Securing ntopng with SSL and Let’s Encrypt
As you know ntopng web interface supports both HTTP (default) and HTTPS. The reason why ntopng does not default to HTTPS is because we provide self-signed certificates that web browsers dislike. Fortunately today you can create a free SSL certificate recognised by all browsers by using Let’s Encrypt open certificate authority (CA). This article describes how you can do this in a few simple steps: for simplicity we limit our scope to Ubuntu/Debian but on other distro’s the procedure is similar. Install certbot as described in this article Suppose that you …
nProbe

Using nProbe and ntopng for Collecting and Visualizing Sonicwall Flows
nProbe is both a probe and a NetFlow/sFlow collector. Recently, we’ve also added added the ability to collect flows with proprietary information elements. This greatly improves nProbe flexibility as any custon, vendor-proprietary information element can be understood, correctly parsed, and exported downstream. Adding proprietary information elements to nProbe is a breeze. Indeed, it suffices to use a plain-text file with the elements description. That’s all. Once the fields have been loaded from the plain-text file, they can be treated as if they were regular fields. So for example they can …

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