Arkime vs Zeek
GitHub Stats
About Arkime
Arkime (formerly Moloch) is an open-source, large-scale, full packet capturing, indexing, and database system. It stores and indexes network traffic in standard PCAP format, providing fast, indexed access to historical network sessions through a powerful web interface. Arkime's viewer lets analysts search, filter, and drill into network sessions by IP, port, protocol, country, ASN, header content, and dozens of other fields. It integrates with Elasticsearch for session metadata storage and supports PCAP export for deeper analysis in Wireshark or Zeek. Arkime is designed to scale to multi-gigabit capture rates across distributed sensors, making it suitable for enterprise and ISP-scale deployments. Its SPIGraph feature provides visual timeline analysis, and the Hunt feature allows searching through full packet payloads. Arkime is commonly deployed alongside Zeek and Suricata for a complete network security monitoring stack.
About Zeek
Zeek (formerly Bro) is a powerful network analysis framework that sits on a network tap, link, or live interface and generates detailed logs describing network activity. Unlike traditional IDS systems that match signatures, Zeek performs deep protocol analysis to produce structured logs for every connection, DNS query, HTTP request, SSL certificate, file transfer, and dozens of other protocol events. These logs are the foundation for network security monitoring - they tell you not just that something happened, but exactly what happened at the application layer. Zeek's scripting language allows custom analysis, from detecting specific attack patterns to extracting files from network traffic. It's widely deployed in academic networks, enterprises, and government agencies, and its logs are commonly fed into SIEM platforms for correlation and alerting. Zeek also includes a signature framework for traditional pattern matching and a file analysis framework for extracting and inspecting transferred files.
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Arkime only
Zeek only