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 […]
ntop 5.0 Released
After a year, it’s time to release a new stable version of ntop. This version deserves a major number, 5.0, as many things have changed. Beside bug fixes and general improvements, in this release we redesigned the ntop engine, that up to version 4.x was a bit cumbersome. We now have a layer 2 (MAC […]
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 […]
Packet Monitoring using ntop and Cisco ON100
From time to time, Cisco builds ntop-friendly products. This is the time of the Cisco ON100 network agent. This tiny device that can fit on your hand, has been integrated with ntop for the purpose of traffic monitoring as you can read on this technical note Enabling ntop Packet Monitoring with Cisco OnPlus Service. ntop is an optional […]
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 […]
Released ntop 4.1
Over the week end we released ntop 4.1. We decided to create a smaller version with respect to the previous 4.0.3 in order to remove some legacy code that caused trouble in the past. This release lacks some of the 4.0.3 features but it can benefit in terms of stability and efficiency. The next release […]
Ok, but how much time do I have?
Accelerating packet capture and processing is a constant race. New hardware innovations, modern computing architectures, and improvements in packet capture (e.g. PF_RING) allow applications to reduce the (both CPU and real) time they need for processing packets. But the main question still holds: how much time do I have for processing packets? This is the […]
ntop in 2011
Most of you know only small pieces of the ntop project. I have decided to prepare a few slides that you can use as tutorial for showing how the various project components can be used to efficiently monitor networks, and what you can expect in 2011 from this project (see for instance vPF_RING and n2disk). […]
Monitoring Traffic Using ntop: Cisco Traffic Analyzer
Most network administrators use ntop for monitoring ethernet traffic. ntop can do much more than this and also monitor Fibre Channel and SCSI traffic. Cisco Traffic Analyzer is a software product based on ntop whose goal is to give Cisco MDS 9000 users a view of the network traffic. Did you know that ntop can […]