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.