ntop traffic monitoring
Just like the PySNMP script in Chapter 7, Network Monitoring with Python – Part 1, and the NetFlow parser script in this chapter, we can use Python scripts to handle low-level tasks on the wire. However, there are tools such as Cacti, which is an all-in-one open source package, that include data collection (pollers), data storage (RRDs), and a web frontend for visualization. These tools can save you a lot of work by packing the frequently used features and software in one package.
In the case of NetFlow, there are a number of open source and commercial NetFlow collectors we can choose from. If we do a quick search for the top N open source NetFlow analyzers, we will see a number of comparison studies for different tools.
Each one of them has its own strengths and weaknesses; which one to use is really a matter of preference, platform, and our appetite for customization. I would recommend choosing a tool that would support both v5 and v9, and potentially...