Deep packet inspection (DPI) provides the network visibility critical to security, compliance and performance initiatives. As threats and traffic volumes grow exponentially, DPI is becoming indispensable. This comprehensive guide compares leading enterprise DPI tools on all critical capabilities.
The Growing Necessity of Deep Packet Inspection
Before exploring solutions, we will briefly summarize the capabilities and use cases driving DPI adoption.
DPI analyzes the full content of network packets in real-time, decoding payload data to identify traffic by application, user, device and other attributes. This metadata allows administrators to detect threats, diagnose issues, and establish usage policies.
According to researchers IDC, global IP traffic will reach 366 exabytes per month by 2025, up from 122 EB in 2020. Video, cloud, and web apps account for over 85% of this traffic.
Simultaneously, cyber threats are increasing in scale and sophistication.
- Malware variants surged by 358% during 2022 according to Fortinet researchers.
- 61% of organizations suffered a successful cyberattack in 2022 per Verizon’s latest Data Breach Report.
As networks transmit more business-critical data, the ability to inspect traffic, detect threats, and troubleshoot issues is imperative.
However, traditional monitoring solutions that rely on superficial packet headers or sampled netflow records cannot provide adequate visibility. Only deep packet inspection reveals what is truly happening on the wire.
Key capabilities provided by full packet inspection solutions include:
Application recognition – Classify over 1500 cloud, web and mobile apps using behavioral models that decode traffic to identify services regardless of port or encryption. This allows organizations to establish granular usage policies.
Threat detection – Use payload analysis to detect zero day exploits, malware call backs, suspicious activities. Integrate with protective controls like next-gen firewalls to block threats.
Performance monitoring – Monitor quality of service metrics for business critical apps including bandwidth consumption, transaction times, jitter, packet loss.
Forensics – Retroactively reconstruct and analyze conversations between clients, servers, devices throughout the network.
Next we explore key considerations when evaluating enterprise-class DPI solutions.
Critical Capabilities for Deep Packet Inspection
While DPI offers invaluable network visibility, effectively leveraging it poses multiple technology and business challenges.
Solutions must balance sophisticated analysis with blazing fast performance. Meanwhile data privacy safeguards, storage demands, and compliance formalities increase legal and administrative overhead for security teams.
Here are the core technical and operational requirements for delivering value from deep packet inspection:
Application recognition – The library of supported applications and protocols directly impacts the coverage and accuracy of traffic classification and metrics. Libraries should cover business critical enterprise apps, popular consumer services, industrial control system protocols, and regional apps by locale.
Analysis depth – The fidelity of inspection determines what threats and performance issues can be detected. Analysis depth capabilities include:
- Decrypting TLS/SSL and SPDY encrypted sessions using keys or computational methods
- Reassembling fragmented packets and decompressing traffic before inspection
- Tracking bidirectional conversational flows rather than individual packets
- Detecting tunneling, encryption, and other methods used by malware to avoid inspection
Scalability – Solutions must keep pace with ever-rising line speeds from 10 Gbps to 100 Gbps in enterprise data centers and ISP networks. Tactics like distributing analysis across CPUs, FPGA acceleration, load balancing, and sampling preserve performance.
Supported environments – Solutions should flexibly support various deployment models like physical or virtual appliances, containerized software, and cloud SaaS delivery.
Alerting and reporting – The analytics of DPI are only as valuable as the visibility they provide to admins. Robust alerting policies customized by application, detection logic, user group or other variables enable automated issue notification. Custom reports provide operational intelligence to multiple stakeholder groups in business terms.
Data retention policies – Storing extensive network packets raises significant data privacy concerns that organizations must balance. Solutions should allow custom data retention schedules after which cached packets are securely deleted.
Access controls – Given the sensitivity of traffic metadata, role based access controls govern which analyst groups can query data under compliance policies like need-to-know and least-privilege access.
We will now assess how leading DPI solutions stack up on these critical requirements.
Deep Packet Inspection Solution Scorecard
Here we compare both commercial and open source DPI options across core capabilities like application classification depth, monitoring scope, and investigative options.
| Solution | App Recognition | Analysis Depth | Environment Support | Reporting Customization | Data Retention | Access Controls |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer | 250+ apps | Limited | Physical/virtual appliances | 12 report templates | 1 week max | Minimal RBAC |
| Paessler PRTG | 300+ apps | Limited | Physical/virtual appliances | Highly customizable dashboards | 24 hours only | Role templates |
| SolarWinds NPM | 1000+ apps, custom additions | Good – AppStack integrations | Physical/virtual appliances, cloud environments | Custom reports via Report Manager | 1 year max | RBAC through Orion platform |
| Wireshark | 1000+ protocols | Expert-level full packet | General purpose laptop/desktop | Command line, third party integrations | Managed via OS | Native application |
| nTOP ndpi | 1700+ apps | Very deep traffic reassembly and decryption | Optimized for high-speed probing | Embedded API for data extraction | 8 days in commercial version | Customization requires programming |
| Netify DPI | 1700+ apps, custom signatures | Good – regex pattern detection | Software library integrated into security solutions | Calling application dependent | Calling application dependent | Calling application dependent |
While meeting operational requirements, these solutions take very different technical approaches. Next we analyze leading commercial DPI systems and popular open source options in depth.
Commercial Deep Packet Inspection Systems
Commercial network monitoring suites like ManageEngine, Paessler, and SolarWinds integrate deep packet inspection capabilities alongside broader device health monitoring, uptime tracking, and virtualization awareness.
These tools excel at delivering visibility quickly in typical enterprise IT environments thanks to appliance-based deployments, wizard-driven configuration, customizable reporting templates, and task-focused user interfaces.
However, they typically lack specialized security analytics and high speed capture capabilities relative to dedicated network forensics platforms. We will examine key strengths and limitations of leading commercial players.
ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer
Highlights
- Friendly interface popular with non-technical teams for basic traffic analysis needs
- Prebuilt reports like Application Traffic Analytics, Health Index, Network Bandwidth Monitoring
- Models available as hardware or virtual appliances starting under $2,000
- Integrates with Active Directory for user-centric monitoring and role-based access
Use Cases
NetFlow Analyzer allows organizations new to network monitoring to quickly setup application traffic reports. The focus is delivering visibility to client services and infrastructure teams rather than advanced security analytics.
Paessler PRTG
Highlights
- Automatically discovers network devices and topology
- Maps network traffic load in real-time with visual dashboards
- Flexible sensor-based monitoring setup ideal for distributed environments
- Alert based on unusual traffic patterns, link failures, latency, packet loss
Use Cases
PRTG shines at monitoring overall network utilization and troubleshooting intermittent quality of service issues impacting user experience.
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor
Part of the Orion cloud-based IT monitoring platform, SolarWinds NPM serves enterprises demanding very scalable traffic analytics.
Highlights
- AppStack methodology classifies cloud services and on-prem apps
- Dedicated appliances scale to analyze up to 100 Gbps speeds
- Long term forensic data retention meets compliance mandates
- NPM integrates network topology and configuration data from suite components like NetFlow Traffic Analyzer and Network Configuration Manager.
Use Cases
SolarWinds NPM suits large organizations looking to consolidate multiple monitoring consoles into a centralized dashboard. The focus is operational intelligence rather than advanced threat analytics typically enabled via add-on modules.
Considerations for Evaluation
While commercial solutions enable rapid deployment of DPI via their appliance models and configuration wizards, additional factors to weigh include:
Total cost of ownership – The need for physical or virtual infrastructure, power, cooling, and licensing can have a hidden impact on ROI. Appliance solutions typically require additional spending to scale analysis as traffic volumes grow.
Platform lock-in – Many monitoring suites leverage proprietary technology not easily migrated between systems or randomized for security purposes.
Integration overhead – Getting 360 network visibility requires integrating alerts, reports, packets, and tool metadata between DPI analysis, SIEM, firewall, and other systems. Vendor mismatch complicates sharing data.
To avoid surprise issues, use free trials and read detailed technical specs when evaluating commercial tools rather than relying purely on slick dashboards and sales claims.
Next we examine widely used open source DPI options providing low cost yet extremely sophisticated traffic inspection capabilities.
Open Source Deep Packet Inspection Tools
While lacking the IT compliance and support typical of enterprise products, popular open source networking tools deliver surprisingly advanced DPI capabilities.
Characteristic advantages of open source DPI tools include protocols and data formats, real-time processing suitable for 10 – 100 Gbps links, tight integration across the inspection, reporting, and analytics pipeline.
The primary challenges fall on the operations side – namely integrating the solution into existing network topology without disruption, building management interfaces, ensuring uptime and reliability, and getting expert assistance.
Let‘s analyze leading open source packet inspection capabilities leveraged across multiple network visibility projects.
Wireshark
Wireshark needs little introduction as the de facto standard network protocol analyzer used across IT teams, from network engineers to application developers and threat researchers.
Leveraging the mature Wireshark dissectors and capture engines, numerous commercial solutions integrate backend analytics with the familiar Wireshark interface for expert-level DPI.
Highlights
- Inspect thousands of protocols in depth – essentially a canary to test equipment against
- Filter capture results by sessions, packets, hosts, protocols
- Generate I/O and timing statistics helpful for diagnosing latency issues
- Extend protocol dissection via Wireshark‘s Lua API
Use Cases
While extremely technical, Wireshark brings DPI capabilities to IT generalists handling triage of network anomalies or application troubleshooting. The tool pairs well with monitoring-focused systems, filling gaps with deep forensic inspection up the OSI model.
nTOP nDPI
The nDPI library delivers high-performance DPI for the nTOP suite of open source network monitoring platforms including nProbe cento for flow collection, n2disk for packet capture, and the ntopng graphical interface.
Highlights
- DPI engine optimized for line rate processing on 10G+ links
- Reconstructs web sessions and other TCP connections masked by encryption, fragmentation, or tunneling
- API access allows tapping real-time traffic analysis for custom security analytics
- Supported by commercial edition with advanced reporting, analytics, and technical support
Use Cases
The highly scalable DPI provided by nDPI suits carrier-grade environments found in ISP and academic networks. The visibility and metadata generated finds additional applications in the cybersecurity domain by SIEM vendors leveraging n2disk, Moloch, and similar open source packet inspection platforms.
Netify DPI
Netify DPI offers an open source packet inspection library designed for use in firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and application-based traffic monitoring.
Highlights
- Optimized C library wraps powerful DPDK packet capture frameworks
- Passive TLS fingerprinting recognizes encrypted connections
- Supports custom application signatures tailored to non-standard network protocols
- Integrates with other security tools like Suricata IDS, guiding threat detection
Use Cases
Netify DPI enables accelerated packet capture and analysis for network engineers developing their own appliances and analytics. The engine monitoring and security value without the overhead of proprietary DPI systems.
Considering Professional Services and Support
While open source delivers incredible IT infrastructure software to innovative adopters, mission critical enterprise monitoring requires professional services and vendor support typical of commercial solutions.
Before implementing open source DPI organization-wide, evaluate options for technical training, maintenance, and hot standby hardware to avoid business disruption in the event of failures.
Supported adaptations of nTOP like nProbe Cento warrant consideration, offering DPI capabilities on par with seven figure offerings at significantly lower TCO.
The Future of Deep Packet Inspection
As traffic volumes, encryption, ultra high-speed networks, and virtualization expand, DPI technology continues evolving apace to turn packet data into security and operational intelligence.
Emerging techniques promise to overcome traditional blindspots imposed by encryption, tunneling, or data fragmentation, while machine learning mechanisms automate threat detection reducing dependence on manual signature updates.
Other innovations improve scalability and deployment flexibility, with containerized analysis distributions harnessing horizontally scaled cloud infrastructure or disaggregating hardware functions to support cheaper centralized capture.
These trends illustrate why DPI visibility and controls will only grow in importance over coming years.
Conclusion and Recommendations
This definitive guide explains the security and operations use cases driving deep packet inspection adoption while delineating the technical and operational considerations when evaluating solutions.
We surveyed both leading commercial offerings oriented towards typical Fortune 5000 IT environments as well as popular open source tools favored by carriers and research institutions.
While early DPI deployments focused on basic traffic classification for usage trends and bandwidth management, contemporary solutions offer so much greater threat detection, performance diagnostics, and analytics value vital for competing as a digital business.
Here are key recommendations based on your organizational needs:
Mid-size organizations – Leverage all-in-one solutions like ManageEngine or Paessler to simplify getting started with network monitoring and DPI.
Large enterprises / service providers – Take advantage of platform suites like SolarWinds or open source nTOP to collect netflow data from distributed environments while centralizing monitoring, forensics, and reporting.
Regulated industries – Verify solutions meet regional data privacy standards like GDPR in the EU or CCPA in California regarding data retention, access controls, and breach disclosure.
Custom analytics – leverage programmatic access to network traffic metadata via APIs from tools like Wireshark and nTOP to feed machine learning security models.
We hope this guide has provided you a concise yet comprehensive overview of deep packet inspection technology, use cases, market solutions, and evaluation criteria.
Stay tuned for our upcoming report on network detection and response advancements leveraging AI to automate threat investigation!
