nProbe

nProbe

HowTo Analyse NetFlow/IPFIX/sFlow pcap Traces
Dumping sFlow/NetFlow/IPFIX flows in pcap format can be very useful for troubleshooting or for creating a compact traffic dump. For instance you can dump flow traffic with n2disk (wireshark, or tcpdump) and store them in pcap format, and eventually share them with a shared disk or sent via email. Flows are usually analysed live with nProbe/ntopng but how can you analyse them when saved in pcap format and not captured from the wire? The nProbe package includes a companion tool that allows flows to be extracted from a pcap file …
nProbe

How Sampling and Throughput Calculation Works: NetFlow/IPFIX vs sFlow vs Packets
ntop tools are able to collect various type of flows NetFlow/IPFIX (including dialects such as J-Flow, NetStream) and sFlow/NetFlowLite, this in addition to packet capture/processing. We have decided to seamlessly handle all these formats so that the user does not have to know the inner details of them. so what you do is the usual pipeline where nProbe collects flow from devices (i.e. router or switch) or turns packets into flows. In both cases nProbe will deliver this information to ntopng by enriching the exported flows with additional data (e.g. …
nProbe

nProbe 10.4 is now Available: Cloud Support and Agent Mode
This is to announce the release of nProbe 10.4. In this version we have made several improvements (including support for new platforms and distributions) as well merged the agent code into the main code base (via -T) on both Linux and Windows. This feature allows you to export (for traffic originated or terminated on the host where nProbe runs) additional contextual information such as the user or process name that produced specific traffic flows. The agent mode is used in ntopng to implement the cloud mode support, that enables nProbe …
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 …
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) …
nProbe

Now available ntopng/nprobe ARM64 Docker Images
Supporting 64 bit ARM platforms is important because there is now a plethora of inexpensive boards based on this architecture. Thanks to the use of docker containers, several manufacturers allow their devices to take advantage of this technology to run third-party software on devices that used to be not extensible. Here you can read how to run ARM64 containers on Mikrotik devices (soon we’ll publish a separate post on this subject). For this reason starting this month, we’ll publish weekly updates of ARM64 docker images that you can run on …
nProbe

How To Analyse Asymmetric VLAN Traffic
A VLAN is a method for partitioning a layer two broadcast domain creating virtual networks of homogeneous systems hence promoting network segmentation. A ethernet port with no VLAN tag is called access port, whereas a switch port with VLAN-tagged packets is called tagged or trunk port. End systems are usually connected to access ports meaning that they deal with untagged packets that are then marked by the switch according to the VLAN port configuration. For this reason a end system is not aware of the VLAN id that is used …
nProbe

How Flow-Based Traffic Classification Works
Many ntop products such as ntopng, nProbe, and PF_RING FT just to name a few are based on network flows. However not all our users know in detail what is a network flow, and how it works in practice. This blog post describes what they are and how they work in practice. What is a network flow? A network flow is a set of packets with common properties. They often are identified by a 5-tuple key meaning that all packets of a given flow have the same source and destination …
nProbe

nProbe 10.2 is Available: Redesigned Kafka Export, nTap and Google Cloud Support
Today we announce the availability of nProbe 10.2 that features native nTap support for generating flows from remote devices, and redesigned Kafka support for both flow export and communication with ntopng. With this respect, the new –ntopng <URL> command line option will replace in the future –zmq as it allows to both specify if ZMQ or Kafka is used to communicate with ntopng (i.e. “–ntopng zmq://192.168.1.10:1234” is the new syntax that replaces “–zmq tcp://192.168.1.10:1234”). In this release nProbe also supports exports to Google Pub/Sub for implementing a scalable datalake. Finally, …
nProbe

Scaling Up: How To Collect, Analyse, and Store Flows at Scale (100 Gbit+)
Most ntop tools such as nProbe cento and n2disk have been designed to run at high speed (today we consider 100 Gbit a high-speed link). ntopng instead has to perform many activities including behavioral traffic analysis that makes it unable to process traffic well above 10 Gbit. In this case you can use nProbe Cento to send ntopng (preprocessed) flows and you can monitor 100 Gbit networks without dropping a single packet. In the above picture ntopng can handle 25k-50k flows/sec per interface (the exact figure depends on the hardware …
nDPI

HowTo Monitor Zoom Performance and Video/Call Quality
Zoom is a popular platform for video communications and team collaboration. As many other cloud services, network administrators need to supervise Zoom network traffic usage. DPI toolkits such as nDPI are useful for identifying Zoom traffic for supervising the network bandwidth used by your Zoom calls. Recently we have took advantage of this research work to improve Zoom protocol dissection in order to Recognise Zoom video, audio, and screen sharing streams (previously they were classified just with a generic Zoom label). In addition to existing metrics such as bandwidth or …
nProbe

HowTo Deploy nProbe and ntopng on the Cloud
Some of our customers deploy ntopng on the cloud in order to collect flows coming from private nProbe instances often deployed on private networks or clouds. Thanks to ZMQ/Kafka communications, data sent by nProbe to ntopng travel encrypted; this is contrary to many other cloud-based collectors that instead receive clear-text IPFIX/NetFlow flows sent by exporters devices. In this setup ntopng cannot poll the routers as they are on a private networks thus unreachable from ntopng. This means that ntopng cannot poll router interfaces via SNMP and thus to report symbolic …

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