Historical Flows¶
ntopng can dump flows data to a persistent storage and provides view to browse recorded flows data in the past.
Traditionally, in order to provide historical data, ntopng required a connected MySQL database. Check out the Flows Dump documentation for more details on how to setup the connection and the historical views available for this mode.
However, due to the users feedback on the MySQL low performance with high flow insertion rates, ntopng now integrates a beta version of a specialized flows dump database called nIndex which overcomes the limits of MySQL. This is currently available only in the enterprise version of ntopng.
Note
The historical views provided with the MySQL integration (like the “Historical Explorer”) are not compatible with nIndex.
The rest of this page documents the use of nIndex as flows storage.
Enabling Flow Dump¶
Warning
This is a beta feature. It may contain bugs which corrupt the flows data. Use the MySQL flow dump for a stable flow storage.
In order to dump flows to disk ntopng requires the -F nindex option to be specified. 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 analize 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|::
Retention Time¶
The retention of the flows dump on disk can be configured from the “Flow Database Dump” preferences: