Visualize your network with Skydive

Outlook

The special feature in Skydive is not the colorful icons in the topology view, which move in a circle across the screen every time you click. The treasure is the connection data that the agents collect in capture mode and report to the analyzer. Skydive can process and analyze this information. The analyzer does not do the work itself but harnesses other tools for this purpose.

The Skydive Flow Matrix add-on prepares IP connections generated by those hosts on which an agent is running. The resulting list contains the protocol, source, destination address, port numbers, and address of the server that accepted the connection. If you find the comma-separated list too boring, you can also admire the data in the form of a Graphviz diagram or Circos ring graph.

Another add-on offers less eye candy but proves useful for security: Security Advisor continuously receives flow information from the analyzer and examines, filters, modifies, and saves the results. The results can be stored on Amazon S3, for example, and analyzed as Flow Logs using AWS methods.

Conclusions

Just as a skydiver admires the beautiful landscape below them, Skydive surveys the network from a bird's-eye perspective. The information comes from the Skydive agents, which collect data on Linux servers and report to a central Skydive analyzer. On the analyzer, admins can retrieve information about the network via the web interface or the command line, examine individual data streams, and even inject packets they define themselves if necessary. The added value of Skydive lies in its holistic approach, which displays the known network components in the form of a graph and visualizes interrelationships.

The Author

Markus Stubbig is a networking engineer who has worked in the IT industry for 16 years. His strong focus is on design and implementation of campus networks around the world.

Buy this article as PDF

Express-Checkout as PDF
Price $2.95
(incl. VAT)

Buy Linux Magazine

SINGLE ISSUES
 
SUBSCRIPTIONS
 
TABLET & SMARTPHONE APPS
Get it on Google Play

US / Canada

Get it on Google Play

UK / Australia

Related content

  • Perl: Skydiving Simulation

    Computer game programmers apply physical formulas and special tricks to create realistic animations. Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL), which is available as a Perl wrapper, provides a powerful framework for creating simple 2D worlds with just a couple of lines of code.

  • SDN Up Close

    Globalization, rapidly increasing numbers of devices, virtualization, the cloud, and "bring your own device" make classically organized IP networks difficult to plan and manage. Instead of quarreling, some admins address these problems with a radically new approach: Software-defined networking.

  • When Marketing Experience Lends Perspective
  • Argus

    Argus helps you monitor the flow of data on your network, detect trends, discover worms and viruses, and analyze bandwidth usage.

  • Mesh Networking

    Mesh networking comes to with the IEEE802.11s draft standard. We'll show you how to mix a mesh.

comments powered by Disqus
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters

Support Our Work

Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

Learn More

News