Comparing YANA — Yet Another Network Analyzer vs. Traditional Tools

Advanced Features of YANA (Yet Another Network Analyzer): Filters, Dashboards, and AlertsYANA (Yet Another Network Analyzer) is a modern, flexible tool designed for network engineers, security analysts, and operations teams who need fast, accurate insights into traffic, performance, and anomalies. While the core of YANA focuses on packet capture and basic protocol decoding, its advanced feature set — particularly filters, dashboards, and alerts — is what makes it stand out in production environments. This article explores these advanced capabilities in detail, shows how they fit into real-world workflows, and gives practical tips for getting the most out of YANA.

Introduction to YANA’s advanced functionality
Flexible and expressive filtering
- Capture vs. display filters
- Filter language and operators
- Examples and use cases
Dashboards: visualizing network state
- Widgets and layout components
- Building dashboards for troubleshooting, performance, and security
- Reusable templates and role-based views
Alerts: staying ahead of problems
- Alert types and severity levels
- Thresholds, anomaly detection, and enrichment
- Notification channels and escalation
Integration and automation
- APIs and webhooks
- SIEM and ticketing integrations
Performance considerations and scaling
Best practices and example workflows
Conclusion

Introduction to YANA’s advanced functionality

YANA aims to provide engineers with both raw visibility and higher-level context. Advanced features — filters for precise selection, dashboards for situational awareness, and alerts for proactive operations — help teams move from reactive troubleshooting to proactive monitoring. Each component is designed to be composable: filters power dashboards and alerts; dashboards can embed alert summaries and live packet views; alerts can trigger workflows that use YANA’s API to capture more data.

Flexible and expressive filtering

Filters are the foundation of targeted analysis in YANA. They let you narrow down traffic for capture, refine what’s displayed in the UI, and drive automated actions.

Capture vs. display filters

Capture filters are applied at the capture engine level to limit which packets are recorded to disk or memory. These are optimized for performance and reduce storage and processing overhead.
Display filters are applied after packets are captured. They let analysts focus on particular conversations, protocols, or patterns without re-capturing. Display filters are more expressive and can reference decoded protocol fields.

Filter language and operators

YANA’s filter language is designed to be familiar to users of tools like tcpdump and Wireshark, while adding modern conveniences:

Basic expressions: ip, tcp, udp, icmp
Address and port matching: src ip 192.0.2.1, dst port 443, src net 10.0.0.0/8
Protocol fields: http.host == “example.com”, dns.qry.name contains “login”
Logical operators: and, or, not
Comparison and ranges: bytes > 1500, pkt_len >= 64 and pkt_len <= 1518
Time windows and relative ranges: last 5m, between 2025-08-01T00:00:00Z and 2025-08-01T01:00:00Z
Regular expressions: uri matches //api/v[0-9]+/users/
Macros and saved filters: named filters for reuse across captures, dashboards, and alerts

Examples and use cases

Troubleshooting a slow web app: display filter -> tcp.port == 443 and http.time > 2.0s
Isolating a DDoS reflection source: capture filter -> udp and dst port 53 and dst net 198.51.100.0/24
Investigating suspicious DNS queries: display filter -> dns.qry.type == 16 and dns.qry.name matches /[a-z0-9-]{20,}.com/
Compliance capture for PCI: capture filter -> host 10.1.2.3 and port 443

Dashboards: visualizing network state

Dashboards turn filter-driven data into actionable visual summaries. YANA’s dashboards combine real-time metrics, packet-level drilldowns, and historical trends.

Widgets and layout components

Common widgets include:

Time-series charts (throughput, latency, packet counts)
Top-talkers tables (by IP, subnet, application)
Protocol breakdown pie charts
Heatmaps (latency across endpoints or regions)
Packet list panels with linked display filters
Flow diagrams showing conversation paths and bytes transferred
Custom HTML/markdown panels for runbooks or notes

Widgets can be resized and arranged using a grid layout. Each widget accepts a filter scope and time range so a single dashboard can present multiple focused views using the same underlying capture set.

Building dashboards for troubleshooting, performance, and security

Troubleshooting dashboard: focus on latency, errors (TCP retransmits, RSTs), and packet captures for the affected service. Include quick filters to narrow by client IP or backend.
Performance dashboard: display throughput, application response time, retransmit rate, and MTU issues. Compare rolling 1m/5m/1h windows to catch trends.
Security dashboard: top DNS queries, suspicious TLS SNI values, connection spikes, and alerts timeline. Embed raw packet views linked to suspicious flows.

Reusable templates and role-based views

Dashboards can be saved as templates. Create role-based dashboards (NOC view, SecOps view, Dev view) that expose different widget sets and filters. Templates support environment variables to swap in subnet ranges, service names, or team-specific thresholds.

Alerts: staying ahead of problems

YANA’s alerting system converts observable patterns into notifications and automated responses.

Alert types and severity levels

Threshold alerts: fire when a metric crosses a value for a duration (e.g., TCP retransmit rate > 5% for 2 minutes).
Spike/Drop alerts: detect sudden changes outside short-term historical bounds.
Pattern alerts: trigger on packet-level signatures or filter matches (e.g., repeated DNS TXT queries with encoded payloads).
Stateful alerts: require a sequence of events (failed handshake followed by data exfil).
Severity: INFO, WARNING, CRITICAL — mapped to escalation policies.

Thresholds, anomaly detection, and enrichment

Static thresholds are simple but can generate noise; YANA supports adaptive baselines using rolling windows and seasonal adjustments.
Anomaly detection can use statistical models (z-score, EWMA) or lightweight ML models to reduce false positives.
Alerts can be enriched with contextual data: reverse DNS, geolocation, asset tags, vulnerability scores from CMDB/IT Asset systems.

Notification channels and escalation

YANA supports multiple notification channels: email, Slack/MS Teams, PagerDuty, webhooks, and syslog. Alerts can include links back to dashboard views, pre-populated display filters, or a one-click packet capture export to speed investigations. Escalation policies let you route CRITICAL alerts to on-call while INFO alerts go to a weekly digest.

Integration and automation

YANA is built for integration into modern toolchains.

APIs and webhooks

Full REST APIs allow:

Creating and managing captures, filters, dashboards, and alerts
Querying packet-level data or aggregated metrics
Exporting PCAPs or filtered datasets

Webhooks enable event-driven automation: e.g., an alert webhook triggers a script that spins up a deeper capture or creates a ticket.

SIEM and ticketing integrations

Native connectors or simple webhook/forwarders let YANA feed enriched events into SIEMs (Splunk, Elastic, Sumo Logic) and ticketing systems (Jira, ServiceNow). Enrichment fields improve triage: asset owner, service tags, recent change IDs.

Performance considerations and scaling

Use capture filters to reduce ingested volume; keep display filters for exploration.
Offload long-term storage to cheaper object storage (S3-compatible) and keep hot indexes for recent data.
Horizontal scaling for capture nodes: distribute by VLAN, tap, or span port. Use a central indexing/aggregation service for dashboards.
Monitor resource metrics (CPU, NIC drops, disk I/O) and tune buffer sizes to avoid packet loss.

Best practices and example workflows

Start with broad dashboards for overall health, then add targeted troubleshooting dashboards for critical services.
Save commonly used filters as macros (client-ip, payment-subnet) and reference them in dashboards and alerts.
Use short retention, high-fidelity captures for immediate troubleshooting and lower-fidelity longer retention for trends.
Combine alerts: use a low-severity anomaly alert to start a lightweight capture, and escalate to CRITICAL if the pattern continues.

Example quick workflow:

Alert fires for increased TCP retransmits on service X.
Click alert → opens troubleshooting dashboard filtered to service X.
Start a 5-minute high-fidelity capture on the affected interface using saved filter.
Investigate packet list, identify MTU blackhole due to PMTU issues.
Create ticket with PCAP attached, annotate timeline in dashboard.

Conclusion

YANA’s advanced features — expressive filters, customizable dashboards, and flexible alerts — provide the building blocks for proactive network observability. By combining performant capture rules, rich display filters, and integrated alerting with automated responses, teams can reduce mean-time-to-detect and mean-time-to-resolve for network incidents. Properly configured dashboards and alerts turn raw packet data into actionable insights that support troubleshooting, performance tuning, and security operations.