Effective traffic measurement using ntop

Abstract

Traffic measurements are becoming increasingly complex due to the variety of traffic types and the integration of different network media. Although traditional tools such as sniffers and network probes are still useful for traffic measurement, they often limit their scope to network packet analysis and visualization. This means that human operators need to manually perform specific actions when some anomalous traffic conditions happen since they have very limited, if any, support from the above tools. This article covers the design and implementation of ntop, an open-source Web-based traffic measurement and monitoring application. It enables users to track relevant network activities including traffic characterization, network utilization, network protocol usage, and congestion detection. Ntop's extensibility through dynamically loadable software components opens it to extensions by network administrators. In addition, its native security flaw detection facilities allow ntop to detect potentially dangerous traffic conditions, and hence to dynamically and autonomously adapt network configuration to tackle the identified problems.