ntopng-exporter

A metric exporter for ntopng which scrapes the API that ntopng exposes and then publishes it as a metric.

This is an example of the types of Grafana dashboards that can be made from these metrics:

Current State (as of May of 2024)

At this point, I consider ntopng-exporter more or less feature complete. I am continuing to use it personally, and will continue to update it's dependencies, go versions, etc. on a quarterly basis or so. If there is anything that you find is broken feel free to open an issue and I'll take a look at it when I get a chance. However, in terms of features, I'm pretty limited based upon what is available to me from the ntopng API upstream. Unless they change it significantly, it is unlikely that many features that most people might want are available.

However, if you do find something that is available via the API that I have so far not included here, PR's are always welcome!

Installing

Go to the GitHub Releases Page and download a release for your system. This project publishes binaries for MacOS (darwin), Linux, Windows in x86, amd64, and arm architectures.

Configuring

ntopng-exporter tries to setup a few sensible defaults for you, but there are some things that it needs to know in order to run correctly. Specifically, it needs to know the IP and Port of your ntopng setup, what interfaces you want to monitor on the ntopng machine, and the username/password for ntopng (if you have one set).

By default, your release archive will come with a sample config file that should outline all of the available configuration options as well as point out defaults where they exist.

Modify the default config in any way that you need, and then copy it to one of the following configuration locations (listed in order of precedence):

• <user's home directory>/.ntopng-exporter/ntopng-exporter.yaml
• /etc/ntopng-exporter/ntopng-exporter.yaml
• ./config/ntopng-exporter.yaml (where ./ indicates the working directory that ntopng-exporter is using)

If you configure authentication options for ntopng-exporter, then your config file will contain sensitive information. As such, it is recommended that users change the permissions of the config file so that it is not widely readable:

For Linux this would be done with:

chown <user_ntopng_runs_as> <path_to_config_file>
chmod 700 <path_to_config_file>

Supported Versions of ntopng

Because ntopng's API has shifted quite a bit over the last few versions, this exporter is only able to support version 4.2 and above of ntopng. While I have not specifically tested it against 4.0, I believe that it would not work correctly. Additionally, I can verify that it does not work at all against version 3.8.X or below.

In ntopng version 5.X they introduced the v2 REST API and deprecated the v1 REST API. While the v2 API appears to be mostly backwards compatible with the v1 API, it is a different endpoint. After reviewing all of the code changes it became evident that supporting both versions of the API in a single ntopng-exporter version is not a small task. Therefore, I am releasing versions of ntopng-exporter that are compatible with either the v1 API or the v2 API and not both.

For ntopng version 5.X and below, please use ntopng-exporter version v0.X

For ntopng version 5.X and above, please use ntopng-exporter version v1.X

You'll notice that ntopng version 5.X is compatible with both. For more information please see: ntopng release announcment

Running ntopng-exporter

systemd

If you want to run ntopng-exporter on Linux I recommend copying the systemd unit file (also included in your download archive in the /resources directory) to your local system and having systemd manage it so that it starts when your machine starts.

If you do not run ntopng-exporter on the same host that you run ntopng on, you'll want to modify your version of the unit file and remove: After=ntopng.service

To run ntopng-exporter as a service do the following:

# From your ntopng-exporter unpack directory
sudo cp resources/ntopng-exporter.service /etc/systemd/system
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable ntopng-exporter
sudo systemctl start ntopng-exporter
systemctl status ntopng-exporter

If you run it this way, you'll want to put the configuration file in a system wide path like: /etc/ntopng-exporter

Currently the exporter just writes all relevant output, including errors, to stdout. If you have any problems with it starting or it remaining started, be sure to look through the systemd journal for any errors with something like the following: journalctl -u ntopng-exporter --since="5m ago"

Root Concerns

If you executed the procedure above, systemd will run ntopng-exporter as root which is absolutely not needed and may be a security concern. It is recommended to create a separate user for ntopng-exporter and change the systemd file appropriately.

A basic procedure for this would look like the following:

sudo useradd -r ntopngexport
sudo chown ntopngexport /etc/ntopng-exporter/ntopng-exporter.yaml

The -r flag creates the user as a system user which does not have a password, a home directory, or the ability to login.

Then change the systemd unit file as such:

[Service]
User=ntopngexport
Group=nobody

docker

Another option is to use docker to deploy the service. You can build the docker image yourself, or use one published on Docker Hub.

To run the docker image, a volume containing the ntopng-exporter.yaml configuration file named /config must be mounted and the port needs to be exposed, either with a dynamic port allocation with the --publish-all option or with a specific port mapping with --publish. An example docker invocation that runs the latest published ntopng-exporter would look something like this:

docker run --volume /some/directory/with/config:/config --publish 3001:3001 aauren/ntopng-exporter

To build the image yourself, make sure that you have at least docker 17.05 installed, and build using the command docker build . in the checked out repository.

Running ntopng-exporter Remotely

ntopng-exporter can be run from any machine, it does not have to run on the host that is running ntopng. It only needs to be able to access the ntopng API endpoint. You can usually check that your API is available using something like the following curl command:

curl --cookie "user=admin; password=admin" "http://<ntopng_host>:<ntopng_port>/lua/rest/v1/get/ntopng/interfaces.lua"

If that responds, then you should be able to add that endpoint to your .yaml configuration file with confidence.

Metrics Emitted

Currently, the only supported metric system is Prometheus, however, the design should be extensible to other metric systems. There are examples of the Prometheus metrics emitted in the docs section of this repo.

Grafana Dashboard

There is an example Grafana dashboard that user's can use contained within this repository at grafana-dashboard.json

You can also find an example of the dashboard on Grafana's public dashboard service ntopng-exporter