Netview

Netview is a network visualization tool that displays an animated realtime view of the network. Traffic noticed by the netview-server is classified and aggregated and in turn animated by the netview-client. The goal of netview is to make it easy to understand how a large complex network is being used, by intelligently adjusting node positions in response to real network traffic.

Each edge in the animated graph represents a host pair that are communicating. The protocols being used determine the color of the edge and the bandwidth determines the width of the edge. Nodes move around under the influence of spring and repulsive forces serving to untangle the graph making it easily comprehensible. Edges and nodes fade out over time as the respective connections are closed.

Netview, while being a very addictive eye-candy, has been used to detect and understand sometimes abnormal network activity including effects of worms, attackers and peer-to-peer softwares. It also makes for a great screensaver. :-)

Features

Real-time animated representation of the network
Light-weight network statistics aggregation server
Port based network packet classification
Packet filtering for display purposes
Realtime reverse dns and geographic lookups for hosts

Contributors