Eve takes exotic network monitoring out of the movies and into the 21st century

Ever wondered what a real visualization of network data moving hither and yon would look like? You know, one of those things from the movies where it all looks really exciting and, instead of flat graphs and line after line of ping replies, the data springs to life in a 3d environment where each remote and local host is displayed on a vast virtual field? Wonder no more. The brilliant hackers at Ninja Strike Force have released Eve, a tool which does precisely that -- and it's beautiful to watch.

Check out this 20 second video of what Eve looks like when you fire up Bittorrent on a quiet network.
Each remote host is displayed as a box out in virtual space -- you're able to adjust the perspective of the 3d view -- and you can finally watch all those packets bouncing back and forth. It may seem like just a pretty toy, but it has real practical uses that Ninja Strike Force hopes are worth a few bucks to proactive network monitoring teams.

Eve produces real-time visualizations of network traffic. Because human pattern matching far surpasses any man-made attempt at intuition, the idea behind Eve is that an administrator who becomes accustomed to the way her network 'looks' under normal activity would quickly spot trouble when it happens or would notice unusual flow patterns and be able to react quickly, and with valuable and understandable data at hand.

Eve will set you back about $34 bucks US, which is a tiny price for such an awesome tool. A crippled trial version shows you real data, but randomizes what you see when you look for detail on a remote host; Pretty, but useless.. kinda like Jessica Simpson.

Thanks Elliot!

Tags: commercial, eve, network monitoring, NetworkMonitoring, real time visualization, RealTimeVisualization, security, visualization