BitMON: A Tool for Automated Monitoring of the BitTorrent DHT

The distributed hash table (DHT) formed by BitTorrent has become very popular as a basis for various kinds of services. Services based on this DHT often assume certain characteristics of the DHT. For instance, for realizing a decentralized bootstrapping service a minimum number of peers running on a certain port are required. However, key characteristics change over time. Our measurements show that e.g. the number of concurrent users grew from 5 to over 7 millions of users during the last months. For making reliable assumptions it is thus essential to monitor the P2P network. This demo presents BitMON, a Java-based out-of-the-box platform for monitoring the BitTorrent DHT. This tool does not only crawl the network, but also automatically analyzes the collected data and visualizes the results. BitMON monitors the DHT´s size in peers as well as the peers´ IP addresses, port numbers, countries of origin and session length. Also, the long-term evolution of these indicators can be graphically displayed. Furthermore, BitMON is designed as a framework and can easily be extended or adapted to monitor other P2P networks.