How to Monitor Incoming and Outgoing Requests on Your System Using journalctl

Detect and Respond to Suspicious Network Activity Like a Pro

City intersection with traffic lights and cameras symbolizes network monitoring

As a sysadmin, one of your key responsibilities is to ensure the security and stability of your systems. Monitoring incoming and outgoing network requests is critical for identifying potential security threats, such as unauthorized access or suspicious activity. In this blog post, we’ll explore how to use journalctl, a powerful logging tool, to monitor and analyze network activity on your system.

Why Monitor Network Requests?

Monitoring network requests helps you:

• Detect unauthorized access attempts.
• Identify suspicious outgoing traffic (e.g., data exfiltration).
• Troubleshoot connectivity issues.
• Ensure compliance with security policies.

By leveraging journalctl and other tools, you can gain deep insights into your system’s network activity and respond to threats proactively.

What You’ll Need

To follow this guide, ensure your system has:

• systemd and journalctl (standard on most modern Linux distributions).
• A firewall (e.g., ufw or iptables)…