Visualize pcap file data

One nice day I was given orders to produce network usage statistics to find eventual burst in the network stream. I faced two problems with this task. The network monitoring software was graphing the network flow only every minute which was too coarse and the interface was connected to a switch I had no control over at all, A mirror port had to be ruled out. The assignment was to collect data for a week and then look at the numbers.

I was unsure how to go about it in the first place. To not fall behind I ran tcpdump on the hosts in question until the week was over. At that point in time I had no idea how to process the pcap dump data and I had not the faintest clue how to present it at the end of the week. After a lot of searching I finally came across a nifty feature in tshark allowing me to aggregate bandwidth on a per second basis. Below is a short recipe how to create graphs from captured network traffic.

Prerequisites

• A capture file the wireshark suite understands. E.g. pcap or Solaris snoop among others.
• tshark
• R
• ImageMagick's montage [optional]

Howto

Aggregate traffic with tshark

To properly graph the data tshark needs to generate statistic on a per second basis. The below command will achive this.

tshark -q -z 'io,stat,1' -r <PcapFile> > <StatisticsFile>

The output is looking something like the excerpt below.

===================================================================
IO Statistics
Interval: 1.000 secs
Column #0:
                |   Column #0
Time            |frames|  bytes
000.000-001.000      62      5578 
001.000-002.000      62      5386 
002.000-003.000      62      5692 
003.000-004.000      62      5968 
004.000-005.000      62      5428 
005.000-006.000      62      5838 
006.000-007.000      62      5912 

The only problem with the output above is that the time is relative to the start of the pcap file. The time has to be properly converted in R before plotting the graph.

Produce a graph with R

Finally to produce the graph in PDF or PNG format the below R script is being used.

#!/usr/bin/Rscript

## ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
## Globals for reading the data file
## ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
skip.header  <- 1           # how many lines to skip including the header row
comment.char <- "="         # skip lines with <char> in it 


## ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
## Don't touch below unless you know what you are doing
## ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
col.names    <- c( "time", "frames", "bytes" )
args <- commandArgs( trailingOnly = TRUE )
number.graphs <- length( args )

for ( d in 1:length( args ) ) {
    file      <- args[[d]]
    # get date and time from file name and convert to a time object
    date.time <- as.POSIXlt(
                   gsub(
                     ".*([0-9]{4}-[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{2})_([0-9]{2})-([0-9]{2}).*",
                     "\\1 \\2:\\3:00",
                     file,
                     perl=T
                   )
                 )
    # read the data
    traffic   <- read.table( file=file,
                             header=F,
                             col.names=col.names,
                             skip=skip.header,
                             comment.char="="
                           )
    # massage the data a bit
    traffic$kbits   <- ( traffic$bytes * 8 ) / 1024
    traffic$frames  <- NULL
    traffic$bytes   <- NULL
    traffic$time    <- as.numeric(
                         gsub("-.*", "", traffic$time, perl = T )
                       ) + date.time
    # calculate max an avg
    traffic.max <- round( max( traffic$kbits ), digits = 2 )
    traffic.avg <- round( mean( traffic$kbits ), digits = 2 )
    # prepare the graph
    sub.title <- paste( "Max:", traffic.max, "Kbit/s; Avg:", traffic.avg, "Kbit/s" )
    names( traffic )
    # output as pdf and png 
    pdf( paste( file, ".pdf", sep = "" ) )
    plot( traffic,  type="h", main=file, sub=sub.title, xlab="Time", ylab="Kbit/s" )
    png( paste( file, ".png", sep = "" ) )
    plot( traffic,  type="h", main=file, sub=sub.title, xlab="Time", ylab="Kbit/s" )
}

To run the script issue the following command assuming the above script is called tshark-graph.R. The files names passed to the script require to have the date and time in the file name such as <String>-YYYY-MM-DD_hh-mm.stats.

Rscript tshark-graph.R *stats

Resulting graph

There are sexier graphs out there but from a functional standpoint it does the job.

Combining graphs

R is fully capabale of creating a collection of graphs from a bunch of files but personally I think it's a lot more involved than simply using ImageMagick's montage command.

montage -geometry <Width>x<Height> <GraphFiles> <OutputGraph>

Yields a similar graph like the one below (intentionally downsampled to fit page)