ntopng

ntopng users are familiar with the search box present at the top of each page. It was originally designed to find hosts and jump to their details page. Over the years we have added a lot of new information in ntopng, and limiting its scope only to hosts was not a good idea. The image below is how we have improved it. In the new search we do not limit our scope to hosts but to everything inside ntopng, as a a mini embedded search engine. The first column shows …

Alerts in ntopng are the result of traffic analysis based on checks. Checks detect that specific indicators on traffic require attention: for instance a host whose behavioural score has exceeded a given threshold or a flow that is exfiltrating data. Checks process traffic information with respect to a specific Network element, and for this reason they are divided into families (e.g. host, interface, flow, …). Regardless of the family, they can cover a security aspect, or they can monitor the network performance, for this reason they belong to different categories …

Today we’ll discuss the ntopng integration with Checkmk, a popular open source infrastructure monitoring tool to which ntopng adds traffic visibility. If IT infrastructure monitoring and network usage monitoring would see each other on Tinder, they would both for sure swipe right and match. Bringing the big picture perspective of IT infrastructure monitoring together with the in-depth information from network usage monitoring is thus a logical step. That’s why ntop and tribe29, the developers of the IT monitoring solution Checkmk partnered and jointly built a seamless integration of both tools. …

Caltech has been experimenting with ntopng on our network for slightly over a year now.  We send a decent amount of traffic to ntopng, bursting up to 20Gbps, utilising Cento to read the wire and forward the data to ntopng via PF_RING ZC.  This configuration has been working pretty well, though we were encountering issues once we reached about 16 – 20 days of data retention, where ntopng would begin to drop data points from that point forward, and I noticed InfluxDB would utilize 60% or more of available memory, …

ntopng allows users to aggregate data according to various criteria. In networking, IP addressing (network and mask/CIDR) and VLANs are typical solutions to the problem of aggregating homogeneous hosts (e.g. when hosts carry on similar tasks). Sometimes these aggregation facilities are not flexible enough to cluster hosts that have the same operating system, or flows originated by the same router/switch. In addition to typical network-based criteria such as IP, VLAN, ntopng implements two more data aggregation facilities. Hosts Aggregation: Host Pools A host pool is a logical aggregation of hosts, …

In the first part of this series of articles, we focused on monitoring ISPs and MSP traffic. Today we analyse network traffic in SMEs and home networks. The typical network layout of a home or a small business is depicted below.   The ISP provides a router for connecting to the Internet (e.g. xDSL or fibre) that usually also features an embedded access point used by phones, tablets or laptops to connect to the Internet. In order to monitor LAN traffic, the best solution is to replace the current switch …