NetFlow Dashboard

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About

NetFlow Dashboard is an open-source project that provides a web interface for "near real-time" analysis of NetFlow traffic. It's designed to aggregate network accounting data in such a way as to allow easy diagnosis of traffic anomalies. It is not intended to replace off-the-shelf utilities that measure bandwidth usage. Those are typically SNMP-based and focus on "snapshotting" network throughput without giving a detailed look into specific TCP/IP connections or application usage. This is where NetFlow excels.

The development site also serves as a public demo. This page gives more information on the background of NetFlow Dashboard, insight into some design decisions, and a vague feel for its future. For the truly bored, read about the NFDB team.

Design

NetFlow Dashboard attempts to overcome the historical difficulties with database storage of NetFlow datagrams through a carefully designed database schema using PostgreSQL. Partitioning allows us to store information as "time slices" that improve the performance of the application under typical usage patterns. The source code is distributed under a 2-clause BSD license.

Bug fixes and feature enhancements should be tracked with tickets. Please look there before asking if a particular bug or feature request has been acknowledged.

Portability

The application is designed and packaged primarily for OpenBSD. The main developer uses NetFlow Dashboard for monitoring his networks using a combination of OpenBSD, pf(4), pflow(4), and Damien Miller's flowd collector. The average Systems/Network Administrator should be able to install the application from source on similar UNIX-like systems (Linux, FreeBSD, etc). We do not intend to support other database engines (MySQL, SQLite, etc).

Installation

NetFlow Dashboard is not quite ready for general consumption. An OpenBSD port and a general source distribution will be released soon. Brave users are welcome to check out the source code from the public Subversion repository and install manually. There is also a mailing list available for NFDB users.

Enjoy!

The NetFlow Dashboard team