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?

  • @AnApexBreadBEnglish
    1•8 months ago

    I do. I monitor it in a lot of ways.

    1. IDS at the router
    2. Anomoli Detection at the router
    3. Host based agents on everything I can
    4. L7 Firewalls on everything I can
    5. DNS based monitoring for everything

    Wireguard and Cloudflare Tunnels make network traffic monitoring difficult because it’s all encrypted traffic.