Elastic Network Monitoring and Packet Inspection

Network monitoring is no longer only about checking whether a router is up or whether bandwidth is full. Modern teams need to understand service paths, application transactions, DNS and TLS behavior, IDS findings, endpoint context, cloud flow records, and packet-derived evidence at the same time. Elastic can help by bringing those signals into Elasticsearch, making them searchable with ES|QL, visible in Kibana, and usable by analysts through dashboards and AI agents.

This article explains the main data sources you need, how to onboard them, how Elastic’s out-of-the-box content helps, and where the new Elastic Content Share downloads add extra value for network operations, packet inspection, and security investigations.

What Elastic Adds to Network Monitoring

Elastic is useful for network monitoring because it can combine operational, security, and packet-derived events in one search and visualization layer. A network analyst can move from a topology problem to a packet transaction, from a DNS anomaly to an IDS alert, or from a failing service path to the hosts and ports involved without switching tools for every question.

Kibana dashboards give teams shared operational views. ES|QL helps analysts ask follow-up questions without building a new visualization each time. Elastic Security adds detection and investigation workflows. Elastic Observability adds service and infrastructure context. Together, those capabilities make Elastic a strong workspace for network operations, network security monitoring, and incident response.

Data Sources You Need

The best results come from combining several network data sources. You do not need every source on day one, but each one answers a different class of question.

Network Packet Capture data: captures network traffic between application servers, decodes protocols, and records useful transaction fields. This is the core source for flow, DNS, HTTP, TLS, and protocol health analysis.
Suricata EVE logs: adds IDS/IPS findings, signatures, severities, alert categories, and flow context. This is the source that helps analysts connect packet activity to suspicious or known-bad behavior.
SNMP network device data: adds router, switch, interface, and routing protocol state. Elastic’s newer Network Topology plugin uses SNMP data collected through Logstash to build site, device, and routing topology views in self-managed deployments.
Cloud and firewall flow logs: sources such as VPC Flow Logs, firewall logs, proxy logs, and load balancer logs help fill visibility gaps where packet capture is not possible.
Endpoint and service context: Elastic Defend, host logs, APM, and infrastructure metrics help explain whether a network symptom is caused by a host, service, policy, deployment, or external dependency.

How to Onboard the Data

Start with Fleet and Elastic Agent when possible. Create or choose an agent policy, add the right integrations, and enroll agents close to the traffic or log source you want to observe. Fleet then distributes integration settings and keeps the policy consistent across hosts.

Network Packet Capture: in Kibana, go to Integrations, search for Network Packet Capture, add it to an Elastic Agent policy, choose the network interface and protocol settings, and enroll the agent on a host that can see the traffic. Packet capture usually needs elevated privileges and careful sensor placement, such as a workload host, span port, tap, or packet broker feed.
Suricata: configure Suricata to write EVE JSON, usually to /var/log/suricata/eve.json. Add the Suricata integration to an Elastic Agent policy on the Suricata host, confirm the agent can read the file, and enable event types such as alert, flow, DNS, HTTP, TLS, and stats where useful.
Network Topology plugin: for self-managed Elastic deployments, install the Network Topology plugin in Kibana, apply its index template and ingest pipeline, then configure a Logstash SNMP input pipeline that polls network devices. This gives network engineers site, device, interface, ARP, BGP, and OSPF context in Kibana.
Other logs and flows: add cloud flow, firewall, proxy, DNS, and load balancer integrations where packet capture is not enough or not allowed. Normalize to ECS fields so dashboards and ES|QL tools can work across sources.

For the new downloads in this article, pay special attention to fields such as source.ip, destination.ip, destination.port, network.protocol, network.bytes, event.duration, network.community_id, and Suricata alert fields. Community ID is especially valuable because it lets analysts correlate one network conversation across packet capture and IDS sensors.

Where LogstashUI and the SNMP Manager Fit

LogstashUI is another useful piece for teams that want to manage network-data pipelines more visually. The project describes itself as a beta control plane and visual editor for Logstash. It helps teams author, simulate, deploy, and monitor Logstash pipelines instead of editing every configuration file by hand.

The SNMP manager is the part that best fits this network monitoring workflow. It is designed to manage SNMP polling, traps, discovery, credentials, devices, networks, and profiles through a UI. That makes it a practical companion for self-managed environments that want to use Elastic’s Network Topology plugin, because that plugin relies on SNMP data collected through Logstash.

For network teams, the value is operational control. LogstashUI can help standardize SNMP collection, make pipeline changes easier to review, simulate data handling before deployment, and reduce the risk of configuration drift across Logstash nodes. It does not replace Packet Capture or Suricata data; it complements them by improving the network-device and topology side of the picture.

Where Out-of-the-Box Content Helps

Elastic integrations already include important out-of-the-box assets: ingest pipelines, mappings, dashboards, data streams, and in some cases detection rules or prebuilt investigative workflows. That content is the right starting point for validating that data is arriving, checking source-specific dashboards, and learning the fields a specific integration provides.

Out-of-the-box content is usually source-centric. It answers questions such as “is my Network Packet Capture data arriving?” or “what Suricata alerts were generated?” That is valuable, but real incidents often cross sources. A service problem might involve DNS, TLS, HTTP, a firewall path, and an IDS alert. A topology issue might need both device state and packet evidence. This is where the new downloads add value.

New Download: Network Monitoring Suite for Kibana

The Network Monitoring Suite for Kibana provides two reusable dashboard exports: Network Operations – Live Topology and Packet Inspection Workbench. They are designed to help analysts move from a visual network overview into packet and security details.

The live topology dashboard helps explain paths between external, edge, service, and data tiers. It is useful during outage triage, architecture reviews, service dependency discussions, and tabletop exercises. The Packet Inspection Workbench focuses on packet-derived evidence such as application transactions, DNS and TLS posture, Suricata findings, and protocol behavior.

To use it, download the ZIP, import the Kibana saved-object NDJSON files through Stack Management, then review the expected data views and field mappings. Adjust index patterns, data views, and filters for your packet capture, Suricata, firewall, or cloud flow data. Treat the dashboards as a working template rather than a fixed final design.

New Download: Network Analyzer Agents for Elastic

The Network Analyzer Agents for Elastic package adds AI-assisted workflows for analysts who need to ask repeatable network questions. It includes three Agent Builder agents plus ES|QL tools for data coverage, protocol health, top conversations, Community ID tracing, DNS anomalies, HTTP failures, TLS risks, and Suricata findings.

Network Analyst helps review traffic paths, protocols, ports, latency, failures, and IDS evidence.
Network Threat Hunter helps investigate Suricata alerts, suspicious DNS, TLS posture, and cross-sensor evidence without overstating what the data proves.
Packet Forensics Investigator helps reconstruct application transactions and correlated sensor timelines from HTTP, DNS, TLS, PostgreSQL, flow, and Suricata metadata.

These agents improve daily work because they reduce the amount of context switching and query rewriting required during an investigation. A network analyst can start with a plain-language question, let the agent run the right ES|QL tool, review evidence, and then ask a follow-up question based on the result. The agent does not replace expert judgment, but it helps analysts move faster, stay consistent, and document why a conclusion is supported by the data.

Typical Use Cases

Outage triage: identify whether failed requests are concentrated on one protocol, port, service path, or backend dependency.
Top talker and traffic review: find the conversations responsible for most bytes, failures, or latency.
DNS investigation: review failed lookups, unusually long query names, and activity that could indicate misconfiguration, DGA behavior, or DNS tunneling.
TLS posture review: detect deprecated TLS versions, failed handshakes, expired certificates, or certificate metadata that needs follow-up.
IDS alert enrichment: connect Suricata signatures to the related source, destination, protocol, Community ID, and surrounding traffic.
Packet forensics: reconstruct HTTP, DNS, TLS, PostgreSQL, flow, and IDS context around a specific host, service, or incident.
Coverage checks: confirm which network data sources are fresh before an analyst trusts a dashboard or AI-generated summary.

Added Value Compared with Out-of-the-Box Content

The built-in Elastic content helps you onboard and validate each source. The new downloads are meant to sit on top of that foundation. They focus on cross-source analysis, analyst workflow, and reusable investigation patterns. The dashboards show how network topology and packet inspection can be presented together. The agents turn recurring ES|QL questions into guided workflows that analysts can reuse during incidents, hunts, and health checks.

That makes the downloads especially useful for teams that already have data flowing and now want better operational workflows. Instead of asking every analyst to remember the same field names and query patterns, the package gives them dashboards and agents that encode the investigation path.

Related Downloads

Download the Network Monitoring Suite for Kibana for topology and packet inspection dashboards. Add the Network Analyzer Agents for Elastic when you want AI-assisted investigation workflows for the same network telemetry. For adjacent examples, review the Industrial Network Template dashboards and the Filebeat Suricata Canvas dashboard.