traffic-vis - Network traffic analysis suite

traffic-collector
traffic-resolve
traffic-exclude
traffic-sort
traffic-totext
traffic-tohtml
traffic-tops
traffic-togif

traffic-vis is a suite of tools for network analysis. Its main purpose is to determine which hosts have been communicating on a network, with whom and the volume of traffic.

The collection and summarisation of network packets is performed by traffic-collect(8) This program runs as a daemon, collecting packets off the network interface of your choice, optionally applying a bpf(4) packet filter prior to collection. These packets are summarised and can be dumped to a file at any time. This summary is not intended for human consumption, and should be processed using the other tools in the suite to produce a report.

traffic-exclude(8) will remove specific hosts from a summary, based on IP address.

traffic-resolve(8) is a filter performs the task of resolving hostnames in the summary file. This cannot be done effectivley in the collection program as the DNS traffic may pollute the sampling of network traffic.

traffic-sort(8) will sort a report in one of several ways and can limit the size of a report.

One of the three frontends: traffic-tops(8) traffic-totext(8) traffic-tohtml(8) can be used to convert the summary into a human-readable form.

All the processing tools are filters, accepting a summary on standard input and producing their results on standard output. It is thus possible to combine them for more complex processing.

This is a quick example on how to produce a basic "10 busiest hosts" report using traffic vis.

First, start traffic-collector and let it run for a while. When you feel it has collected enough data, send it a SIGUSR1:

killall -USR1 traffic-collector

It will (unless you have specified otherwise) write a report in /var/run/traffic-collector

This report must be processed before it is understandable. First we will sort the report by bytes transferred and limit the number of hosts in the output to ten:

traffic-sort -Hb -L10 < reportfile > report-sorted.tv

We then resolve the hostnames in the report:

traffic-resolve < report-sorted.tv > report-resolved.tv

Finally we convert the report to a readable form:

traffic-tohtml < report-resolved.tv > report.html

These steps could have been combined into a single command-line:

traffic-sort -Hb -L10 < reportfile | traffic-resolve | traffic-tohtml > report.html

traffic-collect(8), traffic-resolve(8), traffic-exclude(8), traffic-totext(8), traffic-tohtml(8), traffic-tops(8), traffic-togif(8),

Damien Miller <dmiller@ilogic.com.au>

http://www.ilogic.com.au/~dmiller/traffic-vis.html

Hopefully none, probably legion.