This is to announce the release of cento 2.4, a major update focused on boosting export flexibility, improving telco-grade encapsulation support, and strengthening performance and reliability across the entire data pipeline.
This release brings architectural enhancements, new features for ntopng users, and improved compatibility with modern hardware and Linux distributions.
Below is an overview of what’s new.
Key Features
Template-based serialization (JSON/TLV)
Cento 2.4 introduces support for template-driven serialization also when exporting data using JSON and TLV (used by ntopng). Users can now define exactly which fields to export, reducing overhead and enabling tailored integrations.
New event exporter architecture
Cento is now able to send statistics to systems like Kafka or monitoring frameworks. This allows third party collectors to monitor the probe and get information about the system health and performance.
Enhanced GTP support for telco environments
We’ve extended GTP-U capabilities including GTPv0, GRE-in-GTP dissection and TPDU handling. Starting with this version, you can use nProbe to analyze GTP-C and use Cento to analyze GTP-U and correlate it with user info (IMSI) stored in a redis cache by nProbe. This makes cento 2.4 an even stronger fit for mobile network analytics and high-volume encapsulated traffic.
Instance name support
Multi-instance deployments can now use the new --instance-name option to easily distinguish exporters in large-scale or containerized deployments across the network in the collector dashboards (ntopng).
Improvements
Extended TCP statistics
New Information Elements, such as %TCP_STATS_SRC_TO_DST and %TCP_STATS_DST_TO_SRC, add deeper visibility into TCP behavior. Retransmissions and out-of-order packets are now exportable via ZMQ, making troubleshooting more precise.
Napatech flow offload enhancements
For Napatech users, flow offload is now more reliable and powerful:
- Flow table reset at startup
- Better handling of long-lived flows with slice exports
- More detailed offload update statistics
- Passive and active flow-offload modes
ZMQ improvements
- Separate event socket with its own message-ID sequence
- New
--zmq-direct-mappingoption to map capture interfaces to ZMQ export endpoints, useful when scaling up
Network protocol and interface enhancements
- QinQ (802.1ad) support
- Better GTP padding handling
- Improved GRE/MPLS dissection
- Support for 25G interfaces
Other notable upgrades
- Category and confidence level export
- Packet sampling upscaling
- Detailed drop and queue length stats
- Optimized nDPI integration (faster memory release)
- QoE computation only when needed (optimize CPU utilization and export)
- Platform support for Debian 13 and Rocky 10
- Clearer thread labeling with interface names
Cento 2.4 is bringing greater flexibility, telco-grade protocol coverage, improved reliability, and better export capabilities. Whether you’re integrating with ntopng, using Kafka for analytics pipelines, or deploying cento in high-speed monitoring setups, this release delivers noticeable improvements.
Enjoy!