Overview Those of you who have some experience with IDS or IPS systems, like Zeek and Suricata, are probably aware of how CPU intensive and memory consuming those applications are due to the nature of the activities they carry on (e.g. signatures matching). This leads to high system load and packet loss when the packet […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Howto use Kafka (instead of ZMQ) For Reliable Flow Collection and IPC
Historically, we have used ZMQ for interconnecting nProbe to ntopng, as this is a fast and simple messaging system. However one of they key advantage of ZMQ of being broker-less is sometime a problem. In case of maintenance, traffic peaks, or unreliable communications, the ZMQ communication between nProbe and ntopng will drop flows with the […]
HowTo Implement Flow Relay, Replication and Fanout with nProbe
Sometimes flow (sFlow/NetFlow/IPFIX) collection can become a complicated activity when you need to: Collect, on your private network, flows originated by devices with a public IP. Migrate your infrastructure to nProbe/ntopng while sending flows to both nProbe and your legacy collector. Implementing all this is often an expensive exercise with non-ntop solutions, therefore in order […]