If you have a purely Cisco network, all you will need to support is NetFlow. Which standard should you support, sFlow or NetFlow? Although NetFlow has been far more popular, we decided years ago to support sFlow as well," said Marc Bilodeau – chief technology officer of Plixer International. "Many of our customers are running a mixed hardware environment. Another popular collector is the Scrutinizer Flow Analyzer from Plixer International, which works with both NetFlow and sFlow data. There is also some decent freeware such as ntop, a network traffic probe that shows the network usage. To access the data generated by either sFlow or NetFlow enabled devices will require a collector.Ī Google search on either sFlow or NetFlow will drum up a plethora of vendors with collector analyzers, many of whom support the analysis of both. SFlow is a sample-only technology where every X packet is sampled, the length noted, the majority of the packet is discarded and off it goes to the collector.īecause the technology is sample based, accurate representation of 100 percent of the traffic per interface is nearly impossible.Ĭomplex algorithms have been proposed to statistically manipulate the collected data to represent total traffic with a probability of accuracy. The most current version is Version 5 however, Versions 2 and 4 are also widely deployed at this time. SFlow isn't nearly as widely deployed as NetFlow, so fewer collectors are available. SFlow Agents throughout the network continuously send a stream of sFlow Datagrams to a central sFlow Collector where they are analyzed to produce a rich, real-time, network-wide view of traffic flows.Īlcatel, Allied Telesis, Dlink, Extreme Networks, Foundry Networks, HP, Hitachi, NEC and a few others have devices with sFlow chips. The above diagram shows the basic elements of the sFlow system.
Originally developed by InMon Corporation, sFlow products have been available since 2002. This approach removes the load from the router or switch's CPU and memory.
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Like NetFlow, sFlow is a push technology that sends reports to a collector.īut, while NetFlow is a software based technology, sFlow uses a dedicated chip that is built into the hardware. If NetFlow is properly configured and the hardware isn't overloaded, this technology can be nearly 100 percent accurate at representing who is communicating through the device while having a very small impact on the CPU.
Once the conversation has ended or is summarized it is sent to the collector.Ī single NetFlow packet can be very large and contains conversation details on anywhere from 24-30 conversations. It examines packets based on seven key fields and if two packets match on all seven criteria, it assigns them to the same flow or conversation. NetFlow is a technology whereby the router keeps track of all conversations inbound (version 5) on each interface it is enabled on. "Supporting NetFlow to provide improved network visibility remains part of our wide-area data services strategy," said Alan Saldich - product marketing vp at Riverbed Technology.
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