Observe East-West Traffic, Virtualized Workloads, Containers, and Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure
In modern data centers, most traffic never crosses a perimeter firewall — it moves east-west between virtual machines, containers, and microservices, often invisible to traditional network monitoring. ntopng gives cloud and data center teams the visibility to monitor virtualized workloads and hybrid infrastructure with the same rigor traditionally reserved for perimeter traffic.
Why Cloud and Data Center Visibility Is Different
Virtualized and hybrid infrastructure introduces monitoring challenges traditional tools weren’t built for:
- East-west traffic between VMs, containers, and microservices that never traverses a monitored physical link.
- Ephemeral workloads — containers and instances that spin up and down, making static monitoring configurations impractical.
- Hybrid environments spanning on-premise infrastructure and one or more cloud providers, each with different native visibility tools.
- High-density, high-throughput environments where packet capture at scale becomes a performance concern in itself.
The Solution: Visibility Built for Virtualized Infrastructure
- East-west traffic monitoring (ntopng) — track traffic between virtual machines, containers, and services, not just at the data center perimeter.
- Application and workload classification (nDPI) — identify what’s actually running inside virtualized workloads at Layer 7, including encrypted service-to-service communication.
- Flow-based collection at scale (nProbe) — collect and enrich flow data from virtual switches, hypervisors, and cloud-native exporters without requiring full packet mirrors everywhere.
- High-throughput performance (nProbe Cento) — monitor high-density data center links at 100+ Gbps using zero-copy packet processing.
- Hybrid visibility — correlate on-premise and cloud traffic in a single console for consistent monitoring across environments.
Real Use Cases
Monitoring east-west traffic between microservices
A containerized application experiences intermittent latency between services. ntopng reveals the specific service-to-service communication pattern causing delays, without needing to instrument every container individually.
Detecting lateral movement inside the data center
Because most attacks that reach a data center move laterally rather than re-crossing the perimeter, east-west visibility in ntopng surfaces unusual VM-to-VM communication that perimeter security would never see.
Correlating performance across hybrid infrastructure
An application split between on-premise servers and a cloud provider shows degraded performance. Unified monitoring identifies whether the bottleneck is on-premise, in transit, or within the cloud provider’s environment.
Scaling monitoring with infrastructure growth
As a data center scales to higher-density, higher-throughput links, nProbe Cento maintains full visibility at 100+ Gbps without dropping packets or requiring a redesign of the monitoring architecture.
Tracking ephemeral container workloads
Short-lived containers spin up and down constantly. Flow-based monitoring captures their traffic and behavior without depending on static configuration tied to long-lived hosts.
Why Cloud and Data Center Teams Choose ntopng
- True east-west visibility — see traffic perimeter tools miss entirely.
- Built for virtualized and ephemeral workloads — flow-based monitoring adapts as infrastructure scales up and down.
- Hybrid-ready — consistent visibility across on-premise and cloud environments.
- High-throughput performance — scales to 100+ Gbps data center links without compromise.
Related Use Cases
- Network Performance & Observability
- Threat Detection & Network Security
- Flow Collection & Traffic Analytics