Pandora : A Flexible Network Monitoring Platform
Abstract
This report presents Pandora, a network monitoring platform that sniffs packets using purely passive techniques. Pandora addresses current needs for improving Internet middle-ware and infrastructure by providing both in-depth understanding of network usage and metrics to compare existing protocols. Pandora is flexible and easy to use and deploy. The elementary monitoring tasks are encapsulated in independent components we call filters. The actual packet analysis is performed by stacking the appropriate filters. Pandora also preserves user privacy by letting them control the «anonymization- » policy to be enforced. Finally, the evaluation we conducted shows that overheads due to Pandora's flexibility do not significantly affect performance- . Pandora is fully functionnal and has already been used to collect Web traffic traces at INRIA Rocquencourt.