MyBeem (an IPFIX exporter implemented in C language) represents the lowest component of the SLAmeter network traffic measurement/monitoring tool. MyBeem captures packets from the interface card and orgnaises them into flow records. Flow records are containers that carry the properties (e.g. the total number of bytes of all packets belonging to a certain flow) and characteristics (e.g. source IP address) of the flow. The architectue of the exporter is as follows:

The flow records are generated by one or more metering processes. The metering process consists of a set of functions including packet capture, filtering, timestamping, sampling, classification and creating/maintaining flow records in the flow cache. Network traffic monitoring is based on the analysis of the exported flow records. The export of flow records represents a push-based mechanism, where the data are transmitted from the exporter(s) to the IPFIX collector(s) over either the TCP, UDP or SCTP protocol.

MyBeem is in full conformity with IPFIX, Netflow and PSAMP. It is a command-line application without any GUI. It provides logging on various levels (info, warning, debug, etc.) that are shown in the terminal. MyBeem was developed using open-source technologies.

• Latest version: 1.1-9

• Version state: stable, the development was concluded in 2015

• Developers:

  • Dávid Farkas
  • Samuel Tremko
  • Tomáš Kecsey
  • Adrián Pekár
  • Ľuboš Husivarga
  • Viliam Lorinc

• License: GNU GPLv3

• Implementation environment: C programming language in GNU/Linux environment

The documentation is available only in Slovak language:

• User Documentation PDF
• Technical Documenation PDF

• Tutorial on creating a DEB installation package for MyBeem
• Tutorial on implementating a new information element in MyBeem

• Operating System: GNU/Linux i386 or amd64 architecture

• Hardware:

  • processor: 1GHz+ (depends on the traffic load to measure)
  • memory: 512MB+ (depends on the configure cache size)
  • size on disk: 10MB
  • other: network interface card (NIC)

• Software:

  • libpcap-dev version 0.8.3
  • libxml2-dev version 2.6.23
  • openssl-dev version 0.9.1
  • libsctp-dev version 1.0.9
  • libxml2-utils version 2.7.8
  • nDPI version 1.5.2 (requires gawk, gcc, autoconf, build-essential, and libtool packages)

wget https://github.com/cnl-monica/mybeem/tree/master/deb/mybeem_1.1-9_i386.deb --no-check-certificate

sudo dpkg -i mybeem_1.1-9_i386.deb

wget https://github.com/cnl-monica/mybeem/tree/master/deb/mybeem_1.1-9_amd64.deb --no-check-certificate

sudo dpkg -i mybeem_1.1-9_amd64.deb

sudo apt-get install libpcap-dev libxml2-dev libssl-dev libsctp-dev libsctp-dev libssl0.9.8 libsctp-dev libxml2-utils gawk gcc autoconf build-essential libtool

wget https://github.com/cnl-monica/mybeem/tree/master/lib/nDPI_1.5.2.tar.gz --no-check-certificate

sudo su
tar zxvf nDPI_1.5.2.tar.gz
cd nDPI
sh autogen.sh
make
make install
echo "export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=\"/usr/local/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH\"" >> ~/.bashrc

wget https://github.com/cnl-monica/mybeem/archive/master.zip --no-check-certificate

unzip master.zip
cd mybeem-master/src/mybeem
make

mv beem mybeem

sudo mkdir /var/log/mybeem
sudo mkdir /etc/mybeem

sudo cp mybeem /usr/sbin/
sudo cp config.xml /etc/mybeem/
sudo cp mybeemd /etc/init.d/

After installation the program can be run using the following command:

sudo ./beem -c config.xml

or using the following command:

sudo /etc/init.d/mybeemd start

Using these command-line parameters the program can be also configured without the change of the configuration file. The parameters that can be changed in command-line are as follow:

The program can be configured using the config.xml configuration file. The parameters of this file and their description is as follow: