nProbe

nProbe

How to export BGP routing information (AS Path) in network flows
Tools like traceroute have been used for a long time to track the forward path of packets, i.e. the journey of our packets to a remote destination. Unfortunately with traceroute nothing can be said about the path of ingress packets, it not assuming that routing is symmetrical, fact that is often not correct. For this reason we have designed a solution that allows path information to be report in emitted flows. As the most popular exterior gateway protocol used on the internet is BGP, we have designed a tool that …
nProbe

Measuring ntopng+nProbe Flow Processing Performance
NOTE: this post is outdated. Latest versions of ntopng and nProbe improve performance significantly. New figures are given in this post. In this post we try to analyze the performance of nProbe and ntopng for the collection of NetFlow. ntopng and nProbe will be broken down into smaller functional units and such units will be analyzed to understand the maximum performance of every single task as well as of the overall collection architecture. The machine used for the analysis is equipped with an 4-core Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1230 v5 @ 3.40GHz …
nProbe

sFlow Collection and Analysis with nProbe and ntopng
sFlow, short for sampled Flow, is a sampling technology designed to export network devices information, namely: Interface counters (à la SNMP MIB-II); Traffic packets (à la ERSPAN). sFlow agents run on switches, routers, firewalls and other devices, and periodically export interface counters and traffic packets via UDP towards one or more sFlow collectors. sFlow, relying on sampling processes to periodically counters and packets, is scalable and ultra-lightweight and has been embedded into network devices by tens of vendors and manufacturers. Contrary to NetFlow (please note that in sFlow parlance the …
nProbe

Using nProbe for Collecting Ixia IPFIX with IxFlow extensions
Ixia allows to enrich IPFIX records with value-add extensions. Additional information that can be exported, along with standard fields such as source and destination IP addresses, include: Geographical information such as region IP, latitude and city name Application ID or name, device, browser and even SSL cipher used Detail on application and handset (device) type for mobile users HTTP URL and hostname for web activity tracking HTTP and DNS metadata for rapid breach detection Transaction Latency for application performance tracking The latest version of nProbe provides full support for Ixia …
nProbe

Using nProbe and ntopng for Collecting and Visualizing Sonicwall Flows
nProbe is both a probe and a NetFlow/sFlow collector. Recently, we’ve also added added the ability to collect flows with proprietary information elements. This greatly improves nProbe flexibility as any custon, vendor-proprietary information element can be understood, correctly parsed, and exported downstream. Adding proprietary information elements to nProbe is a breeze. Indeed, it suffices to use a plain-text file with the elements description. That’s all. Once the fields have been loaded from the plain-text file, they can be treated as if they were regular fields. So for example they can …
nProbe

Introducing nProbe 8.6: Per-Second Measurements and Collection of Proprietary Flows
We are glad to announce the release of nProbe 8.6 stable release. Among the main new features, this release brings: Per-second measurements of flows traffic Ability to collect proprietary (i.e. using non standard information elements) flows These new features come along with a wide range of new extensions and improvements to the currently existing features and, least but not last, security and stability fixes. Let’s have a brief look at the two main new features mentioned above. Per-second Traffic Measurements Getting cumulative measurements with respect to the flow lifetime not …
Guides

Best Practices for the Collection of Flows with ntopng and nProbe
ntopng can be used to visualize traffic data that has been generated or collected by nProbe. Using ntopng with nProbe is convenient in several scenarios, including: The visualization of NetFlow/sFlow data originated by routers, switches, and network devices in general. In this scenario, nProbe collects and parse NetFlow/sFlow traffic from the devices, and send the resulting flows to ntopng for the visualization. The monitoring of physical network interfaces that are attached to remote systems. In this scenario, ntopng cannot directly monitor network interfaces nor it can see their packets. One …
nProbe

Introducing per-Second Measurements in nProbe Flow Exports
The need to perform on-time and per-second traffic measurements clashes with protocols such as NetFlow where all counters are cumulative with respect to the flow lifetime. So if you have a flow that lasted 2 minutes and moved X bytes, you have no clue what was the throughput of this flow across the 2 minutes. For this reason people started to shorten flow duration with the drawback of putting a lot of pressure on probes as well to increase the disk space and flow records cardinality on collectors. In essence …
nProbe

Using nProbe for Collecting Palo Alto Flows
NOTE: This article is outdated. Please see “Collecting Proprietary Flows with nProbe” for learning  how to collect proprietary Palo Alto flows. nProbe is both a probe and a NetFlow/sFlow collector. As you all know, we have recently added the ability to collect flows with proprietary information elements. However we natively support in nProbe popular flow exporter devices such as Cisco NBAR and Palo Alto security devices. In this article we show you how to collect the latter flows in nProbe. A typical Palo Alto flow is depicted below. As explained …
Announce

Introducing nProbe 8.4: New Metrics and Extensions, Improved Kafka Support
This is to announce the release of nProbe 8.4 that introduces enhanced Kafka support and adds various extensions and stability fixes. We encourage all our users to move to this version. Below you can find the complete application changelog. Enjoy ! Main New Features Implements Kafka batching, options parsing, and variable number of producers Adds Kafka messages transmission statistics New Options --plugin-dir to load plugins from the specified directory --adj-from-as-path to get previous/next adjacent ASNs from BGP AS-path --disable-sflow-upscale to disable sFlow upscaling Extensions Implemented ICMP network latency Added ICMP …
nProbe

Improved nProbe Kafka Export Support: Theory and Practice
Kafka is a distributed messaging system widely used in the industry. Kafka can be deployed on just a small server but it can also scale up to span multiple datacenters. Given the scale and variety of possible Kafka deployments, it is desirable to have flexible, configurable producer applications able to adapt to and robustly feed any Kafka real-world deployment. nProbe, thanks to its export plugin, can be configured as a Kafka producer for the streaming of monitored/collected flows to categories called known as topics. The latest nProbe 8.3.x has been extended …
nProbe

Traffic directions, port mirrors and taps
Network taps have the ability to preserve traffic directions as based on the port you’re monitoring it is possible to know id traffic is going A -> B or B->A. With port mirrors you completely loose this information (this unless you creare a port mirror per direction, not always possible on all network switches) as directions are mixed up and thus typical breakdown charts in/down don’t work. In order to overcome this limitation, in nProbe mimic directions using MAC addresses. In essence if you know the MAC address of your …

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