What is NetFlow Generator?
A NetFlow generator is a dedicated network appliance or software running on a PC and listening on a single or multiple network interfaces (NICs).
What is NetFlow collector?
NetFlow Collector: an application responsible for receiving flow record packets, ingesting the data from the flow records, pre-processing and storing flow record from one or more flow exporters.
How does NetFlow collect data?
How to Collect NetFlow Data
- Flow exporter: a network device (a router or firewall) in charge of obtaining flow data and exports it to a flow collector.
- Flow collector: a device that collects the exported flow data.
- Flow analyzer: an application that examines and analyses the flow data collected by the flow collector.
How do you analyze NetFlow?
The ability to characterize IP traffic and understand how and where it flows is critical for assuring network availability, performance, and security. NetFlow analysis is the practice of using tools to perform monitoring, troubleshooting and in-depth inspection, interpretation, and synthesis of traffic flow data.
Is NetFlow free?
The Free Real-Time NetFlow Analyzer from SolarWinds is one of the more popular tools available to download free. This tool allows you to sort, graph, and display data in various ways that allow you to visualize and analyze your network traffic.
Is NetFlow still used?
NetFlow and IPFIX The NetFlow protocol itself has been superseded by Internet Protocol Flow Information eXport (IPFIX). Based on the NetFlow Version 9 implementation, IPFIX is on the IETF standards track with RFC 5101 (obsoleted by RFC 7011), RFC 5102 (obsoleted by RFC 7012), etc.
How much bandwidth does NetFlow use?
This depends on the number of conversations that are being summarized by NetFlow. According to Cisco, v9 and v5 exporters will use about 1.5% to 3% of the monitored interfaces bandwidth. The traffic will be proportional to the number of active conversations and the interface bandwidth.
What is SFlow vs NetFlow?
SFlow is a pure packet sampling technology. The most notable difference of SFlow vs NetFlow is that SFlow is network layer independent and has the ability to sample everything and to access traffic from OSI layer 2-7, while NetFlow is restricted to IP traffic only.