Historical Flow Report¶
Warning
MySQL flow explorer is deprecated and it has ben discontinued in favor of the Connect to ClickHouse flows explorer.
ntopng can dump flows data to a persistent storage and provides view to browse recorded flows data in the past. Check out the Flows Dump documentation for more details on how to setup the connection and the historical views available for this mode.
Warning
ClickHouse support is not available on Windows and embedded architectures.
Enabling Flow Dump¶
In order to dump flows to disk ntopng requires the -F clickhouse option to be specified as described in the Flows Dump documentation. After this is enabled, new “Flows” entries will appear into the historical charts tabular view dropdown:

Browsing Flows¶
Historical flows data can be accessed from the Historical Charts and are contextual for the specified time frame.

Here is an overview of the currently available flows views:
- Top Clients: shows the top hosts as flow clients and their traffic as flow clients
- Top Servers: shows the top hosts as flow servers and their traffic as flow servers
- Top L7 Contacts: shows the top <client, server, L7 protocol> pairs and their total traffic
By clicking on the icon, it’s possible to explode a particular communication
or host and analyze the raw flows.

The picture above, for example, shows the raw flows between PC local and 17.248.146.148 having the AppleiCloud protocol.
Exporting Flows¶
By clicking on the icon, it’s possible to download a copy of
the raw flows in CSV format. Here is the same data shown in the picture above in
CSV format:
L7_PROTO|IP_DST_PORT|FLOW_TIME|BYTES|FIRST_SEEN|LAST_SEEN|IP_SRC_PORT|NTOPNG_INSTANCE_NAME|IP_PROTOCOL_VERSION|IPV4_SRC_ADDR|JSON|PACKETS|IPV4_DST_ADDR|INTERFACE_ID|PROFILE|INFO|IPV6_DST_ADDR|VLAN_ID|PROTOCOL|IPV6_SRC_ADDR
143|443|1544712866|18262|1544712646|1544712866|32886|PC local|4|192.168.1.6||53|17.248.146.148|1|ssl|feedbackws.icloud.com|::|0|6|::
143|443|1544712876|13958|1544712749|1544712876|34078|PC local|4|192.168.1.6||46|17.248.146.148|1|ssl|p66-iwmb0.icloud.com|::|0|6|::
143|443|1544718548|203978|1544718247|1544718548|38928|PC local|4|192.168.1.6||431|17.248.146.148|1|ssl|p66-ckdatabasews.icloud.com|::|0|6|::
143|443|1544718821|175770|1544718548|1544718821|38928|PC local|4|192.168.1.6||370|17.248.146.148|1|ssl|p66-ckdatabasews.icloud.com|::|0|6|::
143|443|1544723738|14663|1544723557|1544723738|49328|PC local|4|192.168.1.6||45|17.248.146.148|1|ssl|p66-pushws.icloud.com|::|0|6|::
Data Retention¶
The retention of the flows dump on disk can be configured from the Data Retention setting.