ntopng

ntopng

Rethinking Flow Visualisation in ntopng
For years ntopng has listed flows in a tabular view. Our users are used to it, and over time we have added new features and filtering capabilities. What we have not yet done, is rethink how flows are reported. Reworking the ntopng GUI is something we will tackle in the next major ntopng release, but for the time being we have started with tiny changes that should ease the process of understanding what is happening. For this reason the flow page has been extended with a new analysis menu entry. …
nProbe

Scaling Up: How To Collect, Analyse, and Store Flows at Scale (100 Gbit+)
Most ntop tools such as nProbe cento and n2disk have been designed to run at high speed (today we consider 100 Gbit a high-speed link). ntopng instead has to perform many activities including behavioral traffic analysis that makes it unable to process traffic well above 10 Gbit. In this case you can use nProbe Cento to send ntopng (preprocessed) flows and you can monitor 100 Gbit networks without dropping a single packet. In the above picture ntopng can handle 25k-50k flows/sec per interface (the exact figure depends on the hardware …
ntopng

Using Python (including Jupyter Notebook) with ntopng
Most programmers and network/security administrators are familiar with the Python language. As from time to time we receive requests from our users for creating custom reports, or extracting other type of data (e.g. alerts or timeseries) from ntopng, we have decided to create a Python API for ntopng. Such API allows developers to extract data from ntopng similar to what other Python APIs do (e.g. pyshark for Wireshark). Using this API you can Read host statistics Get the active flows list Query network interface stats Search historical flows Those familiar …
Cybersecurity

HowTo Use Periodic Traffic Analysis in Cybersecurity
Since v5 ntopng has the ability to detect periodic activities, i.e. activities that are repeated periodically at a given pace (note that each activity can have a different frequency, and ntopng is able to detect them). Periodic activities are not bad per se (e.g. an email application fetches new messages every 5 minutes) but it can be a good indicator whenever periodicity is reported in alerts. For instance looking at the alerts below you can see that a client is making periodic requests to the same server Looking at the …
nDPI

HowTo Monitor Zoom Performance and Video/Call Quality
Zoom is a popular platform for video communications and team collaboration. As many other cloud services, network administrators need to supervise Zoom network traffic usage. DPI toolkits such as nDPI are useful for identifying Zoom traffic for supervising the network bandwidth used by your Zoom calls. Recently we have took advantage of this research work to improve Zoom protocol dissection in order to Recognise Zoom video, audio, and screen sharing streams (previously they were classified just with a generic Zoom label). In addition to existing metrics such as bandwidth or …
Cybersecurity

What’s New in ntopng: Network Assets
Hello everybody! Welcome back to the weekly blog post of this serie used to update you with the latest ntopng features and graphical changes. Please let us know your feedback! Today we are going to talk about the Asset Map. Have you ever asked yourself, what are the NTP servers in your network? Or, are all active DNS servers? Well, the Asset Map is useful  exactly in this case. The Asset Map is a map we designed to know what exactly is (are) the DNS, NTP,… server(s) active in a …
ntopng

Introducing Lua-based Host and Flow Behavioural Checks
With ntopng version 5 we have migrated performance sensitive sections of the ntopng engine from Lua to C++. This has enabled ntopng to scale up nicely while reducing resource needs such as CPU and memory. The drawback is that writing behavioural checks in C++ is not something that everyone can do. For this reason we are introducing two (one for Flows and the other for Hosts) behavioural checks that enable the check logic to be written in Lua. In order not to jeopardise the ntopng v5 performance, these checks are …
Cybersecurity

What’s New in ntopng: Periodic Activities (a.k.a beaconing) !
Hello everybody! Welcome back to the weekly blog post of this serie used to update you with the latest ntopng features and graphical changes. Please let us know your feedback! Today we are going to talk about the Periodicity Map. You are probably asking yourself what’s so bad about periodic activities, right? First of all, let’s take a look at the Periodicity Map and what are the contained information. What we can see here is: The last seen – last time ntopng has seen a periodic activity (flow) The quintuplet …
nProbe

HowTo Deploy nProbe and ntopng on the Cloud
Some of our customers deploy ntopng on the cloud in order to collect flows coming from private nProbe instances often deployed on private networks or clouds. Thanks to ZMQ/Kafka communications, data sent by nProbe to ntopng travel encrypted; this is contrary to many other cloud-based collectors that instead receive clear-text IPFIX/NetFlow flows sent by exporters devices. In this setup ntopng cannot poll the routers as they are on a private networks thus unreachable from ntopng. This means that ntopng cannot poll router interfaces via SNMP and thus to report symbolic …
ntopng

Deploying ntopng at Scale: Jessa Ziekenhuis
This is a report from one of our users from the field, who decided to use ntopng to monitor a large network. Many thanks to Bjorn for sharing this information with our community.   Our network Jessa Ziekenhuis is one of the biggest, non-academic, hospitals in Belgium. Spread over 4 campuses, we manage 3 data centres and about 90 data racks. Combined, this leads us to over 6,000 connected (and active) hosts ranging from laptops, desktops, MRIs, ultrasounds,… Challenges With hundreds of different specialised (medical) applications, (medical) devices, it’s hard …
ntopng

What’s New in ntopng: Host Traffic Analysis
Hello everybody! Welcome back to the weekly blog post of this serie used to update you with the latest ntopng features and graphical changes. Please let us know your feedback! Today we are going to talk about Host Traffic Analysis. When analyzing traffic generated by a host, one of the main metrics we are interested in protocol traffic. ntopng keeps many traffic counters for traffic a host generates/receives, including traffic per protocol (e.g. TCP), application protocol (e.g TLS), breed (e.g. Unsafe Traffic), etc. In order to enhance those information, we …
nProbe

Howto use Kafka (instead of ZMQ) For Reliable Flow Collection and IPC
Historically, we have used ZMQ for interconnecting nProbe to ntopng, as this is a fast and simple messaging system. However one of they key advantage of ZMQ of being broker-less is sometime a problem. In case of maintenance, traffic peaks, or unreliable communications, the ZMQ communication between nProbe and ntopng will drop flows with the result that some data will never reach ntopng. As Apache Kafka is the de-facto standard for messaging communications, we have decided to extend its support from flow egress in nProbe / nProbe Cento, to communication …

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