tutorials

ntop

Cloud, IoT, sFlow Traffic Monitoring Tutorials #SFUS18

Last week we have presented two tutorials at the Sharkfest US 2018 edition: sFlow: Theory and practice of a sampling technology [ slides ] Packet monitoring in the days of IoT and Cloud [ slides ] We believe these tutorials are interesting for all those who are using ntop (and non ntop tools) and are willing to learn more about sFlow and traffic monitoring in cloud and IoT environments. Enjoy! …
ntopng

Best Practices to Secure ntopng

After a fresh install, ntopng will run using a default, basic configuration. Such configuration is meant to provide an up-and-running ntopng but does not try to secure it. Therefore, the default configuration should only be used for testing purposes in non-production environments. Several things are required to secure ntopng and make it enterprise-proof. Those things include, but are not limited to, enabling an encrypted web access, restricting the web server access, and protecting the Redis server used by ntopng as a cache. Here is the list of things required to …
ntopng

ntopng Grafana Integration: The Beauty of Data Visualizazion

Disclaimer This article is outdated: please see this document for using ntopng with grafana Summary Grafana is one of the most widely known platforms for metrics monitoring (and alerting); ntopng version 3.1 natively integrates with Grafana thanks to a datasource plugin which is freely available; This article explains how to install and configure the ntopng datasource plugin, and how to build a dashboard for the visualization of ntopng-generated metrics. A video tutorial is available as well: Introduction Grafana is an open platform for analytics and visualization. An extremely-well engineered architecture makes …
Guides

When Live is not Enough: Connecting ntopng and nProbe via MySQL for Historical Flows Exploration

Using nProbe in combination with ntopng is a common practice. The benefits of this combination are manyfold and include: A complete decoupling of monitoring activities (taking place on the nProbe) from visualization tasks (taking place on ntopng); The capability of building distributed deployments where multiple (remote) nProbe instances send monitored data towards one or more ntopng instances for visualization; A comprehensive support for the collection, harmonization and visualization of heterogeneous flow export protocols and technologies, including NetFlow V5/v9/V10 IPFIX and sFlow; Full support for any proprietary technology that sends custom …
Guides

Filling the Pipe: Exporting ntopng Flows to Logstash

Logstash comes in very handy when it is necessary to manipulate or augment data before the actual consolidation. Typical examples of augmentation include IP address to customer ID mappings and geolocation, just to name a few. ntopng natively supports network flows export to Logstash. The following video tutorial demonstrates this feature. …
cento

Stream That Flow: How to Publish nProbe/Cento Flows in a Kafka Cluster

Apache Kafka can be used across an organization to collect data from multiple sources and make them available in standard format to multiple consumers, including Hadoop, Apache HBase, and Apache Solr. nProbe — and it’s ultra-high-speed sibling nProbe cento — integration with the Kafka messaging system makes them good candidates source of network data. The delivery of network data to a redundant, scalable, and fault-tolerant messaging system such as Kafka enables companies to protect their data even in-flight, that is, when the consolidation in a database has still to occur. An impatient reader who is eager to use Cento for …
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 releases didn’t allow for thorough historical analyses and were only giving access to recorded flows and providing limited sorting features. With the advances made in the latest ntopng Pro Small Business it is possible to drill-down historical …
Guides

Ntopng Integration with Nagios

Discontinuation Notice This post becomes obsolete effective with ntopng 4.1+. Full discontinuation notice available here. This tutorial shows how to properly configure nagios and ntopng (Professional) in order to send asynchronous ntopng-generated alerts to nagios. Prerequisites It is assumed that the following software is already installed and properly configured: nagios daemon nagios NSCA (Nagios Service Check Acceptor) daemon ntopng Professional Please see the Resources section at the bottom of this page for useful links and guides on how to set-up nagios and NSCA daemons. Tutorial Set-Up This tutorial uses two hosts connected to …