October 2025 performance review: Consolidated stability and data portability improvements across ntopng and nDPI, with a focus on clarity in the bitmap subsystem, robust data handling for serialization, and scalable deployment configurations. Highlights include a system-wide bitmap overhaul for clarity and extensibility, safer import/export workflows, and security-related transport enhancements, alongside bug fixes that reduce crash surfaces and improve shutdown reliability.

September 2025 (ntop/ntopng) focused on delivering user-facing improvements, reliability fixes, and foundational refactoring to enhance maintainability and scalability. The work improved UX, data integrity, and alerting capabilities while strengthening the codebase for faster future delivery.

August 2025 monthly summary for ntop/ntopng. Focused on delivering visible business value through targeted feature work, reliability improvements, and strong maintainability efforts across the codebase. Highlights include documentation improvements, dynamic blacklist capabilities, ZMQ diagnostics enhancements, and comprehensive code cleanup, underpinned by stable fixes.

July 2025 performance focused on delivering user-facing UI/documentation improvements, stabilizing the platform with critical bug fixes, and enabling new capabilities that enhance visibility, collaboration, and enterprise dashboards. The month also included cleanup and refactors to improve maintainability and future velocity, along with updates to distribution artifacts and documentation to reduce support friction and improve on-boarding.

June 2025 performance snapshot: Key backend migration to ClickHouse, multi-format export enhancements, and reliability improvements across ntopng. The team delivered a major database backend migration with API modernization, enabling removal of MySQL dependencies and a unified ClickHouse interface; introduced a parallel, multi-format export pipeline and in-memory import capabilities; extended Lua scripting with CH import mode and improved flow-id propagation; and implemented targeted code cleanups, bug fixes, and observability features to boost reliability and maintainability. These changes reduce data latency, improve scalability, enhance automation, and simplify maintenance while preserving existing external interfaces.

May 2025 performance summary for ntop/ntopng focused on delivering higher UI consistency, stronger reliability at the edge, and improved data processing and query capabilities. The month combined UI/UX polish, build reliability improvements, and targeted bug fixes with enhancements to data visibility and monitoring.

In April 2025, ntopng and related components delivered notable business value through a mix of feature work, reliability improvements, and documentation enhancements across ntopng and nDPI. Key feature work included advanced data querying and search enhancements, MOS-based QoE integration, plus meaningful UI/UX improvements to dashboards and interface handling. Reliability and security improvements reduced noise and risk, while documentation and process improvements improved developer velocity and onboarding. On the ntop/nDPI side, changes were captured in the v4.14 release notes.

March 2025 Monthly Summary (ntopng and ntop/nDPI) Key features delivered (business value and technical impact): - ntopng: Reporting enhancements – added total as in+out, top applications by ingress/egress, and data volume reporting to improve visibility into network usage and capacity planning. Commits contributing: Set total as in+out; Add Top Applications Ingress/Egress to report; Add data volume to report. - ntopng: Alerts capability enhancements – introduced alerting for Lua-host alerts (set_as_attacker and set_as_victim) to improve incident detection and response. - ntopng: Custom query support for reports – enables custom queries for ingress/egress L7 traffic, expanding analysis flexibility for operators. - ntopng: JA4 fingerprinting and custom queries – added JA4 client fingerprinting and integration of custom queries to strengthen application identification and drill-down analytics. - ntopng: Asset Dashboard Revamp and related endpoint migrations – redesigned the asset dashboard for better UX, added icons/links/titles, and migrated asset endpoints to Pro with updated paths and dashboard endpoints for streamlined maintenance and faster access to assets. - ntop/nDPI: UTF-8 JSON support and safety – implemented UTF-8 encoding in JSON serialization with expanded tests and improved safety in string escaping to enhance data integrity and robustness in multi-language environments. Major bugs fixed (quality, reliability, and performance): - General query stability fixes and query filter/column-name adjustments to improve query results consistency. - UI and data presentation robustness fixes (table JS crash when no sort column; pagination; name display; scale adjustments). - Reliability improvements across distributions and endpoints (dist updates, removal of obsolete components, fix for profiles endpoint path and charts, and epoch handling fixes). - Miscellaneous hardening (MAC-specific UI issue, hyperlink references, and OS type validation updates) to reduce edge-case defects. Overall impact and accomplishments: - Delivered significant improvements in data visibility, incident detection, and analytics flexibility while tightening the build-and-release process through distribution updates and removal of legacy components. The work enhances operator efficiency, reduces mean time to detect/resolve issues, and strengthens the platform's ability to scale with growing data volumes. Technologies/skills demonstrated: - Advanced data reporting design (ingress/egress analytics, data volume metrics) and L7 traffic analysis. - Lua-based alerting enhancements and host-scoped alert logic. - JA4 fingerprinting integration and custom query pipelines. - UI/UX improvements for asset dashboards and Pro migrations. - UTF-8 robust handling in JSON serialization for ntop/nDPI and broad test coverage. - Code maintenance and refactoring (dist management, removal of obsolete components, API and docs improvements).

February 2025 monthly summary: Focused on API stability, infrastructure observability, and data analytics across ntopng and nDPI. Key deliveries include an API Endpoint Update to standardize endpoint semantics and a Template Rename to streamline UI templates. Infrastructure improvements shipped: UI enhancements to hide local badges in the infrastructure view and to extend the infrastructure dashboard with mode widgets, plus distribution artifact updates. Data analytics and monitoring enhancements included: Custom Domain Destination Queries (top domains by destination and count of unique destinations) and the addition of per-direction packets/bytes in historical flows, plus QoE metrics added to reports and dashboards. LDAP Extended Users Capabilities enabling extended user permissions and code cleanup. These workstreams included multiple commits across the ntopng repository and supportive changes in ntop/nDPI. Major bug fixes and reliability improvements completed in this period include stabilizing core components with fixes for netfilter per-direction stats, warning suppression, REST host alert triggers, uninitialized variables, periodic task scheduling, and segfaults, contributing to a safer release cycle.

January 2025 focus: strengthen security/documentation, stabilize runtime behavior, enhance testing, and improve UI/infra dashboards. Delivered business value through clearer licensing/SSL guidance, improved stability, expanded test coverage, and faster, more reliable dashboards with enhanced data handling and navigation.

December 2024 (ntop/ntopng) monthly summary: Delivered a major Flow Alerts overhaul with a core refactor of the Flow alerts pipeline and new bitmap handling utilities, enabling more efficient alert processing. Simplified the alert triggering path by consolidating to a single triggerAlert, reducing code paths and maintenance effort. Reworked alert serialization and introduced protocol-info separation, including a new PROTOCOL_INFO_JSON column, to support multiple alerts and improve data integrity across alerts. Implemented optimization for handling multiple alerts triggered in the same iteration, improving throughput under bursty conditions. Strengthened reliability and concurrency: fixed lifecycle issues (deallocation on alert failure/disable), addressed concurrent access to alerts JSON, and resolved initialization overflow and related edge-case bugs. Also delivered targeted documentation updates for ClickHouse integration and developer notes to improve onboarding and maintenance. Technologies/skills demonstrated include C++ code refactor, Lua scripting improvements, ClickHouse schema and integration work, concurrency improvements, and proactive maintenance with documentation updates.

2024-11 monthly summary for ntop projects focusing on delivering business value through improved alert accuracy, performance, and scalable data architectures. Highlights include Suricata flow collection enhancements, comprehensive in-memory and persisted alert data structures across SQLite and ClickHouse, and UX improvements to enable faster, more reliable operator workflows. Key improvements reduce mean time to detect and respond to incidents, support scalable alerting across environments, and lay foundations for broader analytics. Key outcomes: - Strong improvements in alert accuracy and classification for Suricata-driven flows; NDPI confidence parsing and L7 proto detection implemented during flow collection. - Scalable, unified alert model across databases: in-memory engaged_alerts complemented by SQLite and ClickHouse schemas, plus a consolidated aggregated view, rowid enhancements, and an aggregated page across all alert families. - Performance and efficiency gains: optimized engaged-alert checks to avoid full DB scans by inspecting data up to 1 day prior; streamlined query counting when no results; broader filterability by alert status. - UX and operator efficiency: updated engaged status icon, Ensure engaged alerts appear in Require Attention tab, added alert-status filtering, and a chart annotation feature to aid troubleshooting. - Stability, data integrity, and maintainability: a broad set of schema updates (SQLite and ClickHouse), fixes to timing/serialization issues, and targeted code cleanups (nDPI) to reduce technical debt. Impact: - Faster, more reliable alerting and investigation, reduced database scans, and a scalable data model ready for future analytics and multi-backend deployments. - Clear business value through improved detection accuracy, streamlined workflows, and robust data architecture across ntop/ntopng and ntop/nDPI.

Month: 2024-10 — Concise monthly summary focusing on delivering measurable business value through reliability, scalability, and observability improvements across ntopng and ndpi. Highlights include improved logging and rotation, operational risk reduction via asset-manager toggling, improved host resolution in the absence of a name, advanced DNS filtering/response handling for enhanced network visibility, and JSON serialization enhancements in ndpi.