sFlow Overview
Definition
Sampled Flow (sFlow) is a traffic monitoring technology that collects and analyzes traffic statistics.
Purpose
Compared with carrier networks, enterprise networks have a smaller scale, provide flexible networking, and are prone to attacks. Due to these characteristics, enterprise networks often encounter service exceptions. Enterprise users require a traffic monitoring technique on interfaces of devices to locate unexpected traffic and the source of attack traffic in a timely manner so that they can quickly rectify faults to ensure stable running of the network.
sFlow is developed to achieve the preceding purpose. sFlow provides interface-based traffic analysis facilitating preventive maintenance especially on enterprise networks.
NetStream is a technology that collects and analyzes statistics on network flows. Network devices need to preliminarily collect and analyze network flows, and store statistics in the cache. When the cache overflows or flow statistics expire, the statistics are exported. Compared with NetStream, sFlow does not require a cache, network devices only sample packets, and a remote collector collects and analyzes traffic statistics.
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