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?
I’ve gone down this rabbit hole and have yet to find a solution I like. The only routes I haven’t gone down yet are the grey log or sec onion, as the learning curve is steep.
I do use crowdsec and that has been semi-helpful at showing me where a scanner is trying to poke around and on what service.
I currently use ntopng’s community version and that’s been acceptable for now. Some parts are a bit confusing and the documentation didn’t help me understand, but the tables are really well laid out and I can easily see the server/cliebt relationship with in and outbound traffic. I’ll try and share screenshots of how it looks for me to see if that helps you.