This week ntop will be present at the Open Source System Management Conference 2012, that will take place this Thursday in Bolzano, Italy, organized by our partner and sponsor Würth-Phoenix. We’ll give a speech about how to analyze network performance with our nProbe/ntop applications, as well how to characterize the applications generating traffic. In fact it is important not to do generic and aggregate metric monitoring, but to characterize flow-by-flow so that we can generate alerts per-application. During the event we’ll speak about future nProbe extensions that we’ll introduce later …

In 2004 my friend Alex Tudor of Agilent involved ntop on a very challenging project. The idea was to monitor the network from the exact place where packets were originated. In fact popular network taps and span ports are not the right tools as they are added to an existing network (i.e. the network does not need them, but probes do need them). The same applies to active monitoring: traffic should be generated from the right place. So if you want to see the router-to-router latency you should let the router …

For years, applications have used static ports so that port 80 means HTTP, and port 25 SMTP. Unfortunately this 1:1 mapping has been relaxed years ago with dynamic ports so that a given service could use a range of ports (e.g. for circumventing security policies) or even a fully dynamic port (e.g. see portmap). The opposite is also true, namely HTTP can run on ports other than 80, so that you can see it for instance on port 3000 that is the default HTTP port in ntop. HTTP is also …