Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Netflow

NetFlow is a network protocol developed by Cisco Systems to run on Cisco IOS-enabled equipment for collecting IP traffic information. It is proprietary and supported by platforms other than IOS, such as Juniper routers, Linux or FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

Protocol description

Cisco routers that have the Netflow feature enabled generate netflow records; these are exported from the router in User Datagram Protocol (UDP) or Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) packets and collected using a netflow collector. Other vendors provide similar features for their routers but with different names:

   * Jflow or cflowd for Juniper Networks
   * NetStream for 3Com/H3C
   * NetStream for Huawei Technology
   * Cflowd for Alcatel-Lucent

[edit] NetFlow and IPFIX

Although initially implemented by Cisco, NetFlow is emerging as an IETF standard: Internet Protocol Flow Information eXport (IPFIX). Based on the NetFlow Version 9 implementation, IPFIX is the industry standard with RFC5101, RFC5102, etc. Network infrastructure vendors are already adding IPFIX support to their devices.

Read more: Wikipedia

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