Monitoring your V6Direct setup

This page shows a practical monitoring stack for V6Direct users, including ntopng for traffic visibility and open-source tools for device and latency monitoring, plus our own public monitoring tools on GitHub.

Goals of monitoring

Your monitoring should answer four basic questions for your IPv6 edge and backbone.

• Is the tunnel to V6Direct up and stable?
• Is BGP healthy (sessions established, prefixes correct)?
• Is traffic flowing as expected (no saturation, no weird spikes)?
• Are customers or internal services seeing latency or packet loss issues?

Traffic monitoring with ntopng

ntopng is a web-based traffic probe that gives you 360° visibility into flows, top talkers, and protocols on your V6Direct-facing interfaces.

• Monitors mirrored or routed traffic and NetFlow/sFlow/IPFIX exports.
• Shows bandwidth per host, AS, and application, plus security-related views.
• Ideal for watching your V6Direct tunnel or edge interface in real time.

Install ntopng (Debian/Ubuntu)

On Ubuntu 24.04 LTS:

# Add ntop official repository
apt-get install software-properties-common wget
add-apt-repository universe
wget https://packages.ntop.org/apt-stable/24.04/all/apt-ntop-stable.deb
apt install ./apt-ntop-stable.deb

apt-get clean all
apt-get update
apt-get install pfring-dkms nprobe ntopng n2disk cento ntap

apt-get clean all
apt-get update
ntop-installer

Basic configuration

# Edit /etc/ntopng/ntopng.conf (or /etc/ntopng/ntopng.conf.d/local.conf)
# Example minimal config:
-i=eth0          # interface that carries your V6Direct tunnel/edge traffic
-w=3000          # HTTP port

sudo systemctl enable ntopng
sudo systemctl restart ntopng

You can now log in at http://your-server:3000, add users, and build views focused on the interface that carries your V6Direct traffic.

Device and link monitoring

For routers, switches, and servers, a classic NMS gives you SNMP graphs, CPU/temperature, and alerting when something fails.

• Use an SNMP-based NMS (e.g. LibreNMS, Observium, or similar) to monitor core routers and V6Direct-facing interfaces.
• Watch interface utilization, errors, and BGP session state so you can react before links saturate.
• Set alerts for link down, interface flaps, and high CPU/memory on routing nodes.

Latency and reachability monitoring

A lightweight latency/packet loss tool helps you see if issues are local, upstream, or at a specific PoP.

• SmokePing-style tools can probe the V6Direct tunnel endpoint and key IPv6 destinations.
• Use multiple probes (e.g. home vs. DC) to distinguish local issues from transit problems.
• Correlate latency graphs with BGP and interface metrics to pinpoint root causes.

Our in-house monitoring (GitHub)

We also maintain in-house monitoring components that you can reuse or fork from our public GitHub organization.

https://github.com/V6Direct/BGP-monitoring

These repositories typically include exporters, example dashboards, and alerting rules tailored to V6Direct tunnels, BGP sessions, and PoP health.

Example monitoring stack

For most small networks and labs, a simple stack provides good coverage without too much complexity.

• ntopng on a span/TAP or router-facing interface for traffic and security visibility.
• SNMP-based NMS (LibreNMS/Observium/etc.) for device and link health.
• Latency probe (SmokePing-style) for IPv6 latency and packet loss to V6Direct and key prefixes.
• Your GitHub tooling for V6Direct-specific dashboards and alerts.