nTop

Overview

nTop is a web-based, open-source software application for network monitoring, profiling and diagnostics. nTop delivers a new price point for tool capable of the required traffic management of today's ever increasing network complexity.

nTop is classified as a network probe technology. nTop is usually located near a gateway router so it can examine packets entering and exiting the network. Each packets header is examined for the sender/receiver host pair and other network profile information. The profile information is then accumulated by the sender/receiver host pair.

nTop differs from network and services "operational" diagnostic tool - such as the open-source Nagios. Operational diagnostics provide current status - system or service is operational. nTop is building a detailed picture of host and router usage.

Reference Material

1. www.ntop.org
   

2. NTOP - Network TOP
   

   • This 1999 paper that introduced Ntop is authored by the technologies creators - Luca Deri and Stefano Suin. Even though Ntop has significantly evolved over the year, this is still a very good read that provides the core concepts.