A flow is considered ready for NetFlow export when it’s inactive for a set period of time or when a TCP flag (such as FIN or RST) shows the flow has ended.Ģ. The exporter identifies a flow as a unidirectional packet stream with at least one of these in common: input interface port, the source IP address and destination address, source port, destination port number, Layer-3 protocol field or type of service. It aggregates data packets into flows and periodically exports NetFlow records via User Datagram Protocol (UDP) to one or more NetFlow collectors. A NetFlow-enabled device, usually a router or firewall, operates as a flow exporter and collects flow information. NetFlow solutions generally have three main components:ġ. A generic term used to refer to these tools is xFlow. Juniper Networks, NetStream from 3Com/Huawei, Cflow from Alcatel-Lucent, and

Other netflow monitoring protocols include J-Flow from Since NetFlow tracks everything, it can cause network slowdowns. Less traffic flow data to process and analyze, but it minimizes the impact on Introduced by InMon Corp, itĭoesn’t track every packet crossing your network as NetFlow does instead, itĬaptures a random sample of network traffic. Record standard is sFlow, or samples NetFlow. NetFlow v10, although it’s not a NetFlow product.Īnother popular IP network flow monitoring protocol and data The two protocols are so similar that IPFIX is sometimes called Used widely, IPFIX has become the industry standard. Protocol that uses a flexible, template-based approach.

IP Flow Information Export (IPFIX) is another netflow Overall, NetFlow version 9 is more flexible than Previous versions like the popular Cisco Systems NetFlow v5 required you to useĪ fixed set of fields. Template-based and lets you choose which statistics to enable. To other network flow monitoring protocols. (IETF) standard, although “netflow” is also now used as a general term to refer NetFlow is recognized as an Internet Engineering Task Force

Netflow traffic