In short Continuous network traffic recorders are applications (or appliances) that write network traffic on disk. In case of issues (e.g. security breach or network outage) they enable network and security analysts to go back in time and see how a problem originated. The main limitation of this practice is that a lot of data […]
Exploiting Arista MetaWatch with n2disk and ntopng: HighRes Timestamping and Analytics
Precise packet timestamping is a key feature for network traffic analysis and troubleshooting. Traditionally many people use FPGA-based NICs with precise timestamping (e.g. Napatech, Silicom) even though a good precision can be obtained with PTP-based NICs such as many Intel network adapters. A better alternative to this practice is to avoid ad all using specialised […]
Howto Build a 100 Gbit (Drop-Free) Continuous Packet Recorder using n2disk [Part 3]
In the first post of this series (part 1) we described how to build a 2×10 Gbit continuous packet recorder using n2disk and PF_RING, in the second post (part 2) we described what hardware is required to scale from 10 Gbit to 100 Gbit. One more year has past now and we matured more experience with 100 Gbit […]
Introducing n2disk 3.4: 100 Gbit Traffic Dump to Disk
This is to announce a new n2disk release 3.4. In addition to major performance optimisations with FPGA-based NICs, this release adds new interesting features including the ability to filter traffic based on the application protocol, aggregate traffic from multiple (2+) ZC interfaces, a better disk space management in case of multiple output folders (also from the […]
Combining Traffic Recording with Visibility at 100 Gbps
A few months ago, with ntopng 3.8, we introduced support for continuous traffic recording, that allows you to drill down historical data from the timeseries level up to raw packets. This is useful when troubleshooting a network issue or analysing a security event, by combining traffic visibility with raw traffic analysis. In order to record raw […]
Building a (Cheap) Continuous Packet Recorder using n2disk and PF_RING [Part 2]
Continuous packet recorders are devices that capture raw traffic to disk, providing a window into network history, that allows you to go back in time when a network event occurs, and analyse traffic up to the packet level to find the exact network activity that caused the problem. n2disk is a software application part of […]
Drill Down Deeper: Using ntopng to Zoom In, Filter Out and Go Straight to the Packets
ntopng has grown significantly over the past years, providing an increasingly-interesting set of features to support network analysts and troubleshooters in their decisions. Among the most relevant features, it is worth mentioning that timeseries inspection pages have been redesigned and reworked profoundly to facilitate the drill-down of historical data. Similarly, a home-grown high-speed special-purpose flow […]
Introducing n2disk 2.8 with Microburst Detection
Together with PF_RING 6.6, today we also released n2disk 2.8. In this release we introduced support for microburst detection in order to spot traffic bursts, which is crucial in identifying potential capacity issues and troubleshooting packet loss in network equipments. We also improved our “fast” BPF engine extending the supported primitives, and improving the ability to […]
See You Next Week at the ntop Users Meeting
This is to renew the invitation to meet you next week at the ntop users meeting colocated with Sharkfest Europe. The event is free of charge but seats are limited. More information can be found here. Hope too see you next week at the workshop!
Filtering Terabytes of pcaps using nBPF and Wireshark
In a previous post we introduced our new nBPF library that able to convert a BPF filter to hardware rules for offloading traffic filtering to the network card. We did not mention that the same engine can be used for accelerating traffic extraction from an indexed dump set produced by n2disk. n2disk is a traffic recording application able to […]