Realtime High-Speed Network Traffic Monitoring Using ntopng

Monitoring network traffic has become increasingly challenging in terms of number of hosts, protocol proliferation and probe placement topologies. Virtualised environments and cloud services shifted the focus from dedicated hardware monitoring devices to virtual machine based, software traffic monitoring applications. This paper covers the design and implementation of ntopng, an open-source traffic monitoring application designed for high-speed networks. ntopng’s key features are large networks real-time analytics and the ability to characterise application protocols and user traffic behaviour. ntopng was extensively validated in various monitoring environments ranging from small networks to .it ccTLD traffic analysis.