The latest ntopng 4.0 has a renewed look. The main changes we have introduced are: An always-on-top status bar. Key information on the health and status of the network is essential for the analyst and it must be always visible and easily accessible. This is why we have introduced an always-on-top fixed status bar with […]
Merging Infrastructure and Traffic Monitoring: Integrating ntopng with Icinga
Icinga2 is an open source monitoring system which checks the availability of hosts and services, notifies users of outages and generates performance data for reporting. Thanks to its scalability and extensibility, it has become very popular (as Nagios successor) and suitable to monitor complex environments, even across multiple locations. Although popular, it falls short when […]
Identifying Suspicious Flows: Network Issues or Misbehaving Hosts ?
Starting from the latest 3.9 version, ntopng features and handy dropdown menu that allows you to filter flows on the basis of their current TCP state. Being able to filter flows on the basis of their TCP state is particularly useful as it allows to separate the normal flows from those that are suspicious or […]
Drill Down Deeper: Using ntopng to Zoom In, Filter Out and Go Straight to the Packets
ntopng has grown significantly over the past years, providing an increasingly-interesting set of features to support network analysts and troubleshooters in their decisions. Among the most relevant features, it is worth mentioning that timeseries inspection pages have been redesigned and reworked profoundly to facilitate the drill-down of historical data. Similarly, a home-grown high-speed special-purpose flow […]
ntopng Disk Requirements for Timeseries and Flows
Being able to do a priori estimations of the space that ntopng is going to use in a production environment is fundamental for the provisioning of the storage. In this post we try to estimate the space used by ntopng to store timeseries and flows. Timeseries The number of timeseries generated by ntopng depends almost […]
Remote ntopng Authentication with RADIUS and LDAP
In large organizations, it is common to have a centralised authentication system usually named AAA (Authentication, Authorization and Accounting). Managing users typically involves the definition and enforcement of the rights to do some operations or to access certain resources in a network. Being able to grant (or deny) such rights using a centralized authentication system […]
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 […]
ntopng goes Elastic: Introducing ElasticSearch 6 Support
As you ntopng users know, out of the Elastic toolset ntopng supports both ElasticSearch and LogStash. You can use them using the -F flag: –dump-flows|-F] <mode> | Dump expired flows. Mode: | es Dump in ElasticSearch database | Format: | es;<mapping type>;<idx name>;<es URL>;<http auth> | Example: | es;ntopng;ntopng-%Y.%m.%d;http://localhost:9200/_bulk; | Notes: | The <idx name> […]
Network Monitoring 101: A Beginner’s Guide to Understanding ntop Tools
The first important step to start with network monitoring is to analyze what we want to monitor and how to deploy the monitoring solution in the existing network. Here are some important questions to ask ourselves before starting the actual monitoring: Do we need to monitor the entire network or just a specific segment? Do […]
Announcing ntopng 3.2 – The First Move Towards Active Network Monitoring
Today we are glad to announce the new 3.2 stable release of ntopng. Among the most important new features available in this release, there is without any doubt an advanced network devices discovery functionality. Historically, ntopng has always been a fully passive monitoring tool. This release aims at complementing the information gathered from a purely […]