Overview of the nProbe Network Performance Monitoring Agent

nProbeTM is a host agent monitoring software solution developed by ntop that deploys flexibly to any datacenter or cloud environment. nProbe measures network and application performance metrics based on sampled traffic flows, then exports network performance metrics in flow record format to a flow collector and analytics engine.

NPM metrics generated by nProbe

Retransmits:  nProbe samples flows, and for those it samples, it looks at every packet in the flow, measures recurrence of TCP sequence #s.   Calculates retransmits per second and % of total traffic or of any filtered portion of the traffic.

Out of Order Packets:  Measures out of order packets for sampled flows, calculates Out of Order packets per second and % of total traffic or of any filtered portion of the traffic.

Fragments:  Measures number of fragments for sampled flows, calculates fragments per second and % of total traffic or any filtered portion of the traffic.

Bi-Directional Latency:

• RTT/2 Client Latency:  Measures round trip time from send of packet from local host to receipt of response from remote host, divided by two.
• RTT/2 Server Latency:  Measures round trip time from receipt of packet to response from local host to remote host, divided by two
• RTT/2 Application Latency: Measures request/response time in the application layer, such as HTTP GET and response, or HTTP POST and response.

nProbe measures network latency of the server and client and application latency for well known applications.  It’s important we indicate it can do application latency as well as we should differentiate and indicate why that’s important (is the application slow or is the network (and therefore the application) slow.

Complementary Big Data SaaS Platform

While traditional NPM solutions combine performance metric monitoring, storage and analysis in appliances, nProbe agents can export to a Big Data SaaS platform for data collection, retention and analysis. 

Kentik offers the industry’s only Big Data-based, SaaS NPM solution that integrates nProbe host agent performance metrics and billions of NetFlow, sFlow, IPFIX, BGP records matched with geolocation data. Visit the Kentik Network Visibility page to get an overview, learn more about Kentik’s platform for Network Performance Monitoring, or start a free trial to try it for yourself.

Updated: September 17, 2019