The Inter Providers Traffic Analyzer, is a tool to detect "anomalies", i.e. sudden peaks or troughs or abnormal events, in ISPs traffic at an Internet eXchange (follow referred as IX).

The reasons of these anomalies are various (physical problems on the interface, bad configurations, unexpected flows,...) but they always look like an anomalous fluctuation in bandwidth usage. For this reason the amount of bytes transmitted and received by the interfaces of the switches at the IX is the only parameter considered. Any layer 2, 3, 4 header inspection is performed.

In a "node" like an Internet eXchange a variation in the traffic intensity on a specific interface, can generate a small distribute fluctuation on all the other interfaces or a more significant fluctuation on a restricted number of interfaces. Sometimes it can be very difficult to find all the interfaces involved in a "critical event" and looking at each interface's graph can require a big amount of time.

The ability of the tool to find correlations between interfaces that show an anomaly in the same period, makes this tool really helpful in situations where many interfaces are involved.

The tool web interface, allows network engineers to check a particular day and a particular interface and to configure all the parameters needed for the computation. A mailing report system provides a list of all the interfaces showing anomalies and sends it to a customizable number of e-mail addresses.

The tool has been developed by Mix s.r.l. and Padova Ricerche Consortium and is freely distributed for all the Internet Exchanges interested in a new and simple way to check correlated and unexpected behaviour of their traffic flow.