Traffic sensor requirements

Before installing the hub or traffic sensor, ensure your environment meets the following requirements.

Learn this in the Academy

For a guided walkthrough of deploying the traffic sensor, take the free Achieve total visibility with the Traffic Sensor course in the Lansweeper Customer Academy.

Connection requirements

The hub must be able to reach the Lansweeper cloud services over TLS 1.2 or higher. For the list of outbound URLs and ports, see Discovery hub requirements.

System requirements

Traffic sensors always operate in combination with a hub. The hub manages configuration and receives processed data from one or more sensors, while each sensor focuses on local packet capture and analysis.

You can install the traffic sensor on the same machine as the hub, or link it to an existing hub on another machine.

Hub disk space

The hub's connection, CPU, RAM, and network requirements are the same whichever sensor you install. See Discovery hub requirements.

Disk space is the one hub requirement that depends on which sensors you connect. Traffic sensors upload capture files to the hub, so they need considerably more disk space than IT and OT sensors do. Size the disk to cover the minimum for all connected traffic sensors combined; for example, 2 traffic sensors require 10 GB of total free disk space.

Traffic sensor requirements

Each traffic sensor host (physical or virtual) needs sufficient resources to capture traffic at line rate without drops. Typical internal capture volume for a sensor is around 200 MB every 5 minutes, or roughly 400 GB per week, depending on the mirrored scope and traffic patterns.

Hardware requirements and performance expectations

The following guidelines are starting points for sizing traffic sensor hosts. Actual requirements depend on your setup.

For a step-by-step method to size bandwidth, network cards, and transceivers, download the Integrating the Lansweeper traffic sensor into your network white paper (PDF).

Next steps

Now that you understand the requirements, set up traffic collection on your network, then install the sensor:

• Install the traffic sensor - Linux
• Install the traffic sensor - Windows

Frequently asked questions (FAQ)

How does disk cleanup work on the traffic sensor, and how should I size disk capacity?

The sensor’s disk cleanup process aims to keep local storage at approximately 85% utilization by deleting the oldest capture files first, even if some files failed to upload.
As a rule of thumb, plan your disk size so that 85% of your total disk can hold at least ~2× your hourly capture volume (one hour of data plus one hour of buffer/headroom before cleanup starts deleting). For example, if you generate 25 GB/hour, you should plan for roughly (2 × 25 GB) ÷ 0.85 ≈ 59 GB total disk, which corresponds to ~50 GB usable under the 85% cleanup target and provides ~1 hour of buffer.

What specific information does network traffic data include?

The traffic sensor only captures the connection metadata needed to identify and place devices in your inventory: IP and MAC addresses observed on the network, source and destination IPs and ports of observed connections, the date and time of each connection, and a device identifier so observations can be linked to the right asset