nProbe (and ntopng) is a traditional packet-based application, whose lifecycle is Capture a packet and dissect/decode it Update the representation in memory of the network traffic (e.g. the flow table) Export the information Using packets for traffic analysis has several positive things including: Ability to analyse traffic using a port mirror/TAP without installing and agent […]
Containers and Networks Visibility with ntopng and InfluxDB
For a while we have investigated how to combine system and network monitoring in a simple and effective way. In 2014 we have done a few experiments with Sysdig, and recently thanks to eBPF we have revamped our work to exploit this technology as well to be able to monitoring containerised environments. Months ago we […]
Measuring nProbe ElasticSearch Flow Export Performance
nProbe (via its export plugin) supports ElasticSearch flows export. Setting up nProbe for the ElasticSearch export is a breeze, it just boils down to specifying option –elastic. For example, to export NetFlow flows collected on port 2058 (–collector-port 2058) to an ElasticSearch cluster running on localhost port 9200, one can use the following nprobe -i […]
Released nProbe Cento 1.8
This is to announce the release of nProbe Cento 1.8 stable release. This is a maintenance release where we have made many reliability fixes and added new options to integrate this tool with the latest ntopng developments. We suggest all our users to update to this new release so you can benefit from the enhancements. […]
Packets vs Flows: Which Option is the Best?
One of the most difficult steps on a monitoring deployment scenario is to choose where is the best point where traffic has to be monitored, and what is the best strategy to observe this traffic. The main options are basically: Port Mirroring/Network Tap NetFlow/sFlow Flow Collector Port Mirroring/Network Tap Port mirroring (often called span port) and […]
Cento 1.6 Stable Just Released
After more than one year since the latest stable release, we are glad to announce cento 1.6-stable. This new release brings stability, fixes and several new features. Among the new features, it is worth mentioning that: Flows can be exported in a standardized JSON to text files. By default, a user cento runs and owns […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]