ntopng

nProbe

Best Practices for nProbe and ntopng Deployment

We often receive inquiries about the best practices for deploying nProbe and ntopng. This post will try to shed some light on this subject. The first thing to know is how many flows/second in total the nProbe instances will deliver to ntopng.  nProbe Flow CollectionEach nProbe instance can collect a high number of flows (in the 50/100k flows/sec range depending on hardware and flow types), but we typically suggest loading balance flows across multiple instances. Ideally, each nProbe instance should handle no more than 25k flow/sec. As ntop licenses are …
ntop

New, Fast, Scalable ClickHouse Integration for High-Volume Networks

When it comes to monitoring very large networks and the flows’ cardinality reaches into the billions, the performance of historical data storage and query systems becomes a critical bottleneck. Network operators, analysts, and engineers need to access flow records quickly and reliably, whether for traffic analysis, security investigations, or compliance reporting. When faced with massive datasets, even small inefficiencies in the data pipeline can result in slow queries, high CPU and disk usage, and poor responsiveness. At ntop, our mission is to help users gain visibility into their networks with …
ntop

Network Visibility and Observability: ntopng vs SNMP+

Recently, we’ve encountered users with high monitoring requirements. Some users need to monitor 1,000 routers and want to know who are the top talkers or top protocols. Others have a network with 200 branches, each with a NetFlow-enabled router. They need to know from a central location who are the top bandwidth users and ports on selected branches. Essentially, these users don’t need fine-grained network traffic monitoring. They just need a rough idea of who the top network users are (IP and ports). Often, users who ask us these questions …
ntop

HowTo Monitor+nDPI Traffic on Mikrotik Devices Using TZSP

Mikrotik devices are very popular in the ntop community. The simplest way to monitor traffic of these devices is using flows as described in this blog post. However sometimes flows might not be the best choice for various reasons including the inability to perform DPI on the captured traffic.  For full visibility you can use a different option offered by Mikrotik devices. Under Tools -> Packet Sniffer  you can export packets over the TZSP protocol (it is a sort of remote span protocol): just specify the IP of the remote …
ntopng

ntopng and nDPI Technical Webinars

One of the feedbacks we have collected at the PacketFest conference is to schedule periodic webinars about popular ntop tools we develop. For this reason, we have decided to start with ntopng and nDPI: Below you can find the video of the webinars that took plance on May 27th and June 10th.     Enjoy ! …
nEdge

Released ntopng 6.4: More Insightful Than Ever

We’re excited to announce a new ntopng stable release 6.4, a feature-packed update! With a strong focus on assets visibility and QoE monitoring. This version introduces groundbreaking new dashboards, advanced reporting, better alerting, and a lot of improvements to keep your network monitoring efficient and insightful. Breakthroughs Asset Inventory & Digital Twin DashboardVisualize your infrastructure like never before. The new dashboard provides a clear inventory of network assets with their virtual representations. Infrastructure DashboardManage multi-region deployments with a bird’s-eye view of your infrastructure and performance across distributed environments. Autonomous Systems …
ntopng

HowTo Use Host Policy to Detect Misbehaving Hosts

ntopng has several ways to spot unusual traffic patterns, like: Checking if a device is behaving strangely. Sending alerts when a threshold is reached. Looking for changes in traffic metrics (like how much traffic is coming from a particular host). Seeing if host services change. To make these checks even better, ntopng added a new flow behavioral check called “Host Policy.” The idea is simple: there are some special devices on a network, like routers, switches, printers, and other non-general-purpose devices, that shouldn’t send traffic to the Internet. Except for …
Announce

Introducing the New Infrastructure Dashboard in ntopng

For this reason, some time ago we introduced the Infrastructure Monitoring in ntopng, as described in a previous blog post, which is the ability to use ntopng to monitor other ntopng instances, by means of its Active Monitoring capabilities. This infrastructure monitoring feature allows users to gain real-time insights into the status of their ntopng instances, as well as monitor the network interconnecting them. Now, we are excited to introduce a further extension to the Infrastructure Monitoring in ntopng, the new Infrastructure Dashboard. This enhancement enables users to efficiently oversee multiple …
ntopng

9 Reasons You Should Use Ntopng on Your Raspberry Pi

This XDA article has published an interesting article about ntopng on rPI. In particular: Learn and experiment with networking It’s a low-power solution It integrates with other network tools (e.g. Zabbix or Nagios) Optimize your home network traffic Analyze historical network data Manage bandwidth and QoS settings Capture and analyze network packets (via nDPI) Detect unauthorized devices and threats Check network activity from anywhere Do you agree? Enjoy ! …
ntopng

Using ntopng as Generic Flow Collector (log files, firewall events, MQTT…)

Most users of our community use ntopng as flow (sFlow/NetFlow/IPFIX) collector with ntop tools such as nProbe or nProbe Cento. From time to time we receive inquiries about using it as generic flow collector for instance reading connection information from the firewall, log files/syslog, MQTT, or cloud formats. This blog post shows you howto do that, ntopng can collect information via ZMQ, so the simplest mechanism is to export data on top of this protocol. ntopng accepts two formats implemented by the nDPI serialization library: binary TLV (all versions) JSON …
Announce

Introducing ntopng Policy Menu

In the past months we have extended our behaviour analysis introducing new features such as the ACL or device policies. For this reason we have rearranged the menus and create a new Policy menu (you can read more here) that contains all the configurations used by ntopng to trigger alerts. Sue to this, some pages have been moved and changed location. Below you can find the list of the moved pages and how to access them now: Server Ports (Previously, Server Ports Analysis): Previously in the Host entry, moved to …
ntop

HowTo Monitor Router Interfaces Congestion Using SNMP

Sometimes it happens that your router is congested, and you ask yourself “How is it possible?” or “Who is responsible for congesting the network?” or “Which router/port is congested?”. You could simply answer the last question by using the SNMP/Flow Exporters Usage: HowTo Monitor SNMP Interfaces Utilisation and Congestion Rate; but what about the other two? Let’s start by looking at SNMP. As explained in the previous post, if SNMP is enabled on the routers/switches, using ntopng it is possible to figure out if an interface is congested. On the …