
Netflow version 9, which is now a IETF standard known as IP Information Export (IPFIX), is the new standard for transporting information from Switches and Routers to a Collector. Netflow is used for finding bandwidth hogs, hunting down network threats, isolating application slowness issues and even for usage based billing by some ISP's. The Netflow Collector can then provide details on things like, the threats detected, the network topology, top interfaces and graph those trends.
#Active timer when using netflow archive
When the flows expire, they're exported off to the Netflow Collector, which will constantly analyze and archive the flows for future reference. So packets that enter the Router that don't have a matching flow entry are first determined to be routeable and if they're accepted, they're then forwarded after a flow cache entry is made.Ī Flow Cache can contain hundreds of thousands of entries, and in some cases, into the Millions of entries. As the following packets that match an existing flow entry come into the router, the byte and packet counters keep increment through each additional data-gram until the connection between the host involved in the flow is torn down. The packet is then routed out the destination interface.
#Active timer when using netflow software
The protocol itself does not analyze the traffic, but as mentioned previous, when configured properly it sends traffic to a Collector or Analyzer, which is either a hardware device or more often than not, a software program.Ĭisco originally developed the protocol for its products and soon after it has been the standard that many other manufacturers are implementing into their products as well, including Juniper (which has “JFlow”), 3Com/HP, Dell and Netgear (SFlow), Ericsson (RFlow), Huawei (NetStream) and Alcatel-Lucent (which uses CFlow). The protocol allows you to really drill down into your network traffic to see where the traffic source is coming from and to where it is destined too when troubleshooting slow LAN or WAN network connections. It allows you to collect traffic and analyze it through a program (Usually called a Netflow Collector or Analyzer) which then organizes the flow records into a format that allows the IT administrator or Network engineer to further analyze the traffic (Source, destination, etc).

The Nexus 1000v has a few predefined flow records in 5.Netflow, a protocol developed by Cisco, is used to collect and record all IP Traffic going to and from a Cisco router or switch that is Netflow enabled. Nexus 1000v Netflow Configuration for 5.x: I'm going to go over Netflow configuration and some useful commands to troubleshoot issues with NetFlow.
