Do you monitor network traffic? How? - eviltoast

With my zoo of docker containers and multiple servers hosted locally or on some cloud providers, I feel the need more and more to understand what kind of network traffic is happening. Seeing my outbound traffic on some cloud providers I’m sometimes wondering “huh-where did that traffic come from?”.

And honestly I have to say: I don’t know. Monitoring traffic is a real hurdle since I’m doing a lot via tunnels / wireguard in between servers or to my clients. When I spin up a network analysis tool such as ntopng, I do see a lot of traffic happening that is “Wireguard”. Cool. That doesn’t help me one bit.

I would have to do some deep package inspection I suppose and SSL interception to actually understand WHAT is doing stuff / where network traffic comes from. Honestly I wouldn’t be sure what stuff would be happening if there were some malicious thing running on the server and I really don’t like that. I want to see all traffic and be able to assign it to “known traffic” or in other words - “this traffic belongs to Jellyfin”, “That traffic is my gitea instance”, “the other traffic is syncthing” or something along those lines.

Is there a solution you beautiful people in this subreddit recommend or use? Don’t you care?

  • NeverNudeNo13@lemmings.world
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    10 months ago

    You probably want something like netgenius one. That’s enterprise grade but might be a good starting point to research. Alternatively you could look at ips/ids systems that can apply a set of definitions or rules to the analysis, ubiquiti or fortinet has some solutions for this sort of thing but I’m sure there are alternatives out there which would be better depending on your needs.

    You are kind of asking several questions here though and may need to clarify a bit what goal you have in mind for the solution you are looking for.

  • sirrush7@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    Depending on what you run for a perimeter device, but elasticsearch is free and can give you incredible visibility into your network.

    That said, it can be a bit of a beast to learn.

    Simpler deployment is how I have it, running as Zenarmor Sensei inside my opnsense router/firewall which IS my edge.

    There’s also Prometheus and grafana. Grey log.

    Lots and lots of options however, just need to feed these log engines your syslogs.

    That’s the magic ticket!

  • zwamkat@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    It seems as if you would like to see all traffic identified up to layer 7. That is pretty much enterprise level traffic inspection. I’ve done a lot of it on the edge of our network using a Palo Alto firewall with pretty much all software licenses enabled. I could create full blown reports of single users and/or applications. I sure did point out some co-workers ánd applications who where misbehaving on our network.

  • elecboy@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    I use Pi-Hole & NextDNS for all my DNS and I check once a week, for extra security I run a Fortigate 61E with AV/IPS and of course VLAN just for IoT and NVR.

  • InvaderOfTech@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    I have been using libreNMS for over four years and love it. I started to play with checkmk for its agent but found the network side of checkmk is also lovely/easy to work with. I recommend looking at either of these. Both can run in docker or docker-compose.

  • pobrika@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    I use cadvisor to get stats and Prometheus and grafana. Works very well

  • MisterSlippers@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    I’ve been a network engineer, security analyst, security engineer, and SOAR engineer over the course of the last 20 years; I don’t want to think about any of that shit when I’m not being paid for it. I have backups of the things I can’t replace, no port forwarding/ingress rules from WAN on the firewall, and the network is heavily segmented and uses least privilege. The random security stuff I leverage is set to drop/block and my family does a good job being vocal when something isn’t working. If I needed to start over tomorrow, I’d just build a new server with Ansible playbooks on my GitHub.

  • Spaceman_Splff@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    Securityonion is a great ids system. I used their distributed system, so I have 1 mini pc as a sensor and another as a manager/search. Works wonderful.

  • tpwn3r@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    I own a WISP with about 100 clients and admin another wisp/fisp with around 500 clients.

    I love “the dude” by mikrotik. It pulls data via SNMP and gives me a great heads up overview of everything. it also graphs the data over time.

    I use LibreMNS also to pull network data via SNMP and it graphs historical data.