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?
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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.
RemindMe! 2 Days
Easy, set up a mail server, then 98% of your traffic will be inbound attack attempts on that. Like mine…
Do you mean I should monitor my email server running on a XP?
Yep, monitoring in multiple places with Zabbix
I have pfSense as well (soon to be OPNsense) and that shows traffic per network it’s connected to, so that’s great for live traffic
Zabbix monitors the networks and collects traffic data
Zabbix also monitors all containers and their network traffic
I was recently thinking about setting up a transparent squid proxy at router level, I’m curious if it could be useful in this context.
RemindMe! 8 hours
I use my fortigate router as it logs everything natively. Logs DNS request, outbound traffic, internal lan local traffic, and so much more
I do. I monitor it in a lot of ways.
- IDS at the router
- Anomoli Detection at the router
- Host based agents on everything I can
- L7 Firewalls on everything I can
- DNS based monitoring for everything
Wireguard and Cloudflare Tunnels make network traffic monitoring difficult because it’s all encrypted traffic.
What do you use for l7 firewalls?
Zabbx agent on my docker host, can monitor traffic per container.
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!
RemindMe! 3 days
Ok it’s time bro
Awesome, thank you mate 😉🤝
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RemindMe! 5 days
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.
I would suggest looking at Wazuh and setting up a SIEM stack based on it. It would provide what you need and is highly customisable to needs.