We’re excited to announce a new release of Cento 2.2, our high-performance flow-based traffic processing engine. This release brings major enhancements in traffic analysis capabilities, particularly for mobile network monitoring, quality assessment, and flow offloading on Napatech adapters. Whether you’re deploying Cento in ISP-grade infrastructures or using it for deep traffic inspection, this release is packed with powerful new features and improvements designed to push performance and visibility to the next level.
- Full Flow Table Offload on Napatech Adapters
Cento 2.2 now offers fully-fledged Flow Table offload support with the latest Napatech Flow Manager, enabling hardware-accelerated flow processing at high speed both inline or passively, with a reduction of the export latency thanks to periodic counter updates for offloaded flows when using the latest Flow Manager FPGA. - IMSI Correlation for Mobile Tracking
We’ve improved GTP traffic processing with IMSI correlation, enabling effective mobile subscriber tracking — a must-have for telcos and mobile network operators. - Quality of Experience (QoE) Metrics
Cento now computes QoE metrics, offering insights into user-perceived service quality. This is especially valuable in VoIP and media streaming environments, where MOS scores, combined with TCP statistics, and directional QoE stats, can reveal degraded experiences.
As always, we welcome your feedback and contributions. Stay tuned for more enhancements, and thank you for being part of the ntop community!
Changelog
Key Features
- Fully fledged Flow Table offload on Napatech adapters with latest Flow Manager support
- Mobile tracking with IMSI correlation on GTP traffic
- Quality of Experience (QoE) computation
Improvements
- Extended Flow Table offload on Napatech with periodic updates (flow counters) from offloaded flows
- Dynamic templates (–template) are now supported when dumping to text and JSON over ZMQ (in addition to Avro and Kafka)
- Computing TCP statistics (out-of-order, retransmissions, packet loss, keepalive packets)
- Reworked IMSI aggregation for GTP traffic correlation
- Automatically set RSS based on the range in the interface name
- Implement MOS computation on RTP flows
- Implement –lifetime-perturbation to add random flow lifetime perturbation to distribute flows expiration and avoid export storms on startup
- Add –dont-nest-dump-dirs option
- Add more Information Elements to the exported template:
- %FLOW_VERDICT
- %L7_CONFIDENCE
- %RETRANSMITTED_IN_PKTS
- %RETRANSMITTED_OUT_PKTS
- %OOORDER_IN_PKTS
- %OOORDER_OUT_PKTS
- %RTP_IN_PAYLOAD_TYPE
- %RTP_OUT_PAYLOAD_TYPE
- %QOE_DST_TO_SRC
- %QOE_SRC_TO_DST
Fixes
- Fix exported L7_APP_PROTOCOL_NAME
- Fix max interface speed computation
- Fix twin interface speed computation in case of tx offload
- Fix flow export information and stats via ZMQ
Misc/Changes
- List all supported template IEs in –help
- Add thread labels
- Increase Max Frame Size on GRO check
- Exit gracefully on bad option