Owners Manual

How does Traffic Flow work? | Traffic Flow Analyzer
528 OMNM 6.5.2 User Guide
How does Traffic Flow work?
Here is a diagram on how it works followed by some bullet points.
• The NetFlow/IPFIX/sFlow exporting device monitors the traffic that traverses ing it
• The device becomes an Exporter of NetFlow/IPFIX/sFlow data.
• It exports the information to the NetFlow/IPFIX/sFlow Collector
• The collector stores, correlates and presents the information about
• Traffic bottlenecks in networks.
• Applications responsible for bandwidth utilization.
A flow is a unidirectional stream of data between two network nodes. The following key parameters
appear in flows:
• Source IP address
• Destination IP address
• Source port number
• Destination port number
• Layer 3 and 4 protocol type
• Input interface or port
• Output interface or port
• Source Autonomous System Number
• Destination Autonomous System Number
•Number of Bytes
•Number of Packets
Definitions
NetFlow —A traffic flow monitoring technology that is somewhat open-ended and thus it has has
various implementations by different hardware vendors. Sampling is optional, which means
that the reported data might represent samples of the actual data or a full and detailed
reporting of all traffic flow data.