Monitoring mobile networks traffic has been traditionally perceived by the telecommunications industry as something complex, costly, proprietary. This is unfortunately one of the few fields where the open-source movement has not been able to spread much, where vendor lock-in is still the standard. Last year we visited the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona to understand […]
Monitoring on the MicroCloud
When I started to develop ntop in 1998, it was clear to me that the network was a huge, volatile (or semi-persistent if you wish), constantly changing database. In ntop this database is implemented in memory, where for each received packet, ntop updates the hosts, protocols, sessions, packet size….. tables. The web interface is yet […]
10 Gbit (Line Rate) NetFlow Traffic Analysis using nProbe and DNA
In the past couple of years, 10 Gbit networks are gradually replacing multi-1 Gbit links. Traffic analysis is also increasingly demanding as “legacy” NetFlow v5 flows are not enough to network administrators who want to know much more of their network than simple packets/bytes accounting. In order to satisfy these needs, we have added in […]
Getting More Information On Your Network Performance
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 […]
SFProbe: Embedding nProbe on an SFP
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 […]
Using nProbe for Solving General Traffic Monitoring Tasks
Most people use nProbe just as a basic NetFlow/IPFIX probe where traffic monitoring is limited to packet header analysis, without further dissecting protocols. This practice is very common inside the NetFlow community and it’s one of the reasons why flow-based analysis has not changed much since its inception. Fortunately nProbe can do much more than […]
Unveiling Application Visibility in ntop and nProbe (both in NetFlow v9 and IPFIX)
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 […]
Tutorial: Monitoring Application and Network Latency with nProbe
Last May I did a tutorial at the Nagios Conference Europe about application and network latency measurement using nProbe. The video of the tutorial has been now released and you are free to watch it if interested in he topic. The video is available here.
NetFlow-lite Webcast Invitation
This is to invite you to webcast NetFlow-lite: Enable Data Center-wide Monitoring which is scheduled for Tuesday, 06-28-2011. I will be speaking about NetFlow-lite together with the key Cisco people who worked with me at this project. Hope you will join the workshop!
NetFlow-Lite and nProbe: a Tutorial
Today we have held a webinar about NetFlow-Lite with both Cisco and Plixer. Subscribers of this blog should know by now what is NetFlow-Lite and why nProbe is necessary to exploit this technology. Nevertheless you might be interested to know more about NetFlow-Lite, both in terms of features and usage scenarios. Below you can find […]