ntopng

ntopng

ntopng MySQL Flow Export: Increase the Maximum Number of Open Files

ntopng uses partitioned MySQL tables when storing flows. As MySQL needs a file handle for each partition and its index, it is important to make sure that the open_files_limit is large enough to allow the process to keep all these files open. Typically, open_files_limit  default value works out-of-the-box but there are some packages/distributions that keeps this …
ntopng

ntopng 2.6 Roadmap

As we have released 2.4, it is now time to plan for the next release and highlight the list of features we plan to implement so we can start a discussion and get some feedback. The major changes we would like to introduce include: Rework interface views to make them more efficient and not an …
Guides

Best Practices for Efficiently Running ntopng

The default ntopng configuration, is suitable for most of our users who deploy it on a home network or small enterprise network (typically a /24 network) with link speed <= 100 Mbit. This does NOT mean that ntopng cannot operate on faster/larger networks, but that it cannot be used without any configuration. The first thing …
ntopng

Announcing ntopng 2.4: Efficiency is Beauty

At ntop we are on a mission to develop enterprise-grade networking software, mostly open-source, and free of charge for no-profit/research organizations. Since our inception, we have been passionately and resiliently developing software to allow our users to monitor, protect, and preserve their network infrastructure. And we have been doing this in a relentless pursuit for the best and …
Guides

Tweaking MySQL to Improve ntopng Flows Storage Space Usage

Edit: MySQL tables engine has been migrated to MyISAM in ntopng 2.4 so this post only applies for versions <= 2.3. This is the first post that tries to give hints on how to tweak MySQL settings to better accomodate flows exported by ntopng. In particular, in this post it is discussed how to improve …
Guides

How to Analyse MikroTik Traffic Using ntopng

MikroTik routers are pretty popular in particular in the wireless community and many users of the original ntop are familiar with it. With the advent of ntopng, we have decided to avoid natively supporting netflow in ntopng due to the many “dialects” a of the protocol and leave to nProbe the task to do the conversion of …
nProbe

Advanced Flow Collection with ntopng and nProbe

In flow-based monitoring there are two main components: the probe (a.k.a. flow exporter) and the flow collector/analyser. Usually NetFlow/sFlow is a push mode paradigm as network devices have almost no memory/storage and thus they send out data as soon as possible towards a collector. This architecture is suboptimal as the probe is pushing the same data to …
Features

Exploring Historical Data Using ntopng: Part 2

ntopng is able to deliver monitored traffic flows data to a MySQL server. We have already discussed how to configure ntopng to deliver this data in another blog post. In this article we discuss the new features that allow you to dig deep into the flows dumped to MySQL using the ntopng web GUI. Earlier ntopng …
Guides

Monitoring BitTorrent Traffic with ntopng

ntopng has been designed not just for network administrators, but also for small companies and in particular for families. How often you have seen traffic on your network that you did not expect and you asked yourself what was that about. A good example is BitTorrent traffic that can be used for efficiently downloading files and not …
ntopng

Using nfsen-like Traffic Profiles in ntopng

One of the great features of nfsen is the ability to specify filters for identifying specific traffic and thus aggregate and graph it. In ntopng we aggregate traffic per host and networks. However sometimes you want to aggregate using other criteria. Examples include: Traffic from host A to host B VPN traffic sent from host X …