With my zoo of docker containers and multiple servers hosted locally or on some cloud providers, I feel the need more and more to understand what kind of network traffic is happening. Seeing my outbound traffic on some cloud providers I’m sometimes wondering “huh-where did that traffic come from?”.
And honestly I have to say: I don’t know. Monitoring traffic is a real hurdle since I’m doing a lot via tunnels / wireguard in between servers or to my clients. When I spin up a network analysis tool such as ntopng, I do see a lot of traffic happening that is “Wireguard”. Cool. That doesn’t help me one bit.
I would have to do some deep package inspection I suppose and SSL interception to actually understand WHAT is doing stuff / where network traffic comes from. Honestly I wouldn’t be sure what stuff would be happening if there were some malicious thing running on the server and I really don’t like that. I want to see all traffic and be able to assign it to “known traffic” or in other words - “this traffic belongs to Jellyfin”, “That traffic is my gitea instance”, “the other traffic is syncthing” or something along those lines.
Is there a solution you beautiful people in this subreddit recommend or use? Don’t you care?
Generally, no. But I seriously restrict container networking, most of my containers are unable to reach internet, unless absolutely necessary. Also, my firewall is not super-restrictive, but it is different from defaults :)
Sometimes I do some monitoring though.