ngraph - Active TCP Connections Collector

ngraph is a metrics collector tool designed to work in conjunction with node_exporter. Its primary goal is to provide information about existing network connections on a machine, which can then be utilized to build a graph of network interactions within your infrastructure.

Installation

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/alebsys/ngraph.git

Build the ngraph binary:
```
cd ngraph
go build
```
Run the ngraph binary:
```
./ngraph
```

Usage

ngraph accepts command-line arguments to customize its behavior. Below are the available options:

--interval: Interval for generating metrics (default: 15 seconds).
--output: Path for metric files (default: "/tmp/node_exporter/textfile").
--all: Scrape connections from all network namespaces (default: false).

Example:

./ngraph --interval=30 --output=/path/to/metrics --all

Metrics

ngraph generates Prometheus-compatible metrics in a textfile format. The resulting metrics are stored in the specified output directory with the filename ngraph.prom.

The primary metrics provided is:

network_connections_input_total: Total input number of unique network connections per hosts;
network_connections_output_total: Total output number of unique network connections per hosts.

Example:

network_connections_input_total{dest_ip="10.12.57.104", src_ip="10.12.57.27", peer_hostname="example.com"} 3
network_connections_output_total{src_ip="10.12.57.104", dest_ip="10.24.127.27", peer_hostname="example.com"} 2

Example of possible visualization of metrics in grafana:

Contributing

Feel free to contribute to ngraph by opening issues, proposing new features, or submitting pull requests. Your feedback and contributions are highly valued.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.

Acknowledgments

ngraph makes use of the procfs library to interact with the /proc filesystem. Special thanks to the authors and contributors of procfs.