When AppMon met Stager

Monitoring applications provide an important service in network related activities, such as network monitoring, network management and network software engineering. They facilitate the need of understanding exactly what occurs inside our networks and how each network interacts with the rest of the Internet. From private and local networks, to large-scale corporate networks and intranets, there is an ever-growing need to characterize and analyze network traffic. Unfortunately, network monitoring applications have the side effect of generating huge amounts of real-time data, that need to be processed, stored and presented, in an effective fashion. If this is done correctly and efficiently, network administrators, researchers, as well as users, can extract useful information from them, such as, traffic patterns, newly deployed network protocols, etc. In this paper we present our experiences on the combination of two tools, AppMon and Stager, and the study of the resulting system. AppMon is a network monitoring toolkit which performs per-application traffic classification. Stager is a tool which stores, aggregates and presents long-term network statistics, coming from multiple monitoring sides. We modified, combined, and extended these tools so that real-time data produced by AppMon are transferred, converted and stored through Stager. The resulting system gives access to valuable aggregated long-term network data which were not available through existing tools and methods.