Cflowd Overview - Alcatel-Lucent 7450 Configuration Manual

Cflowd Overview

Cflowd Overview
Cflowd is a tool used to sample IPv4, MPLS, and Ethernet traffic data flows through a router.
Cflowd enables traffic sampling and analysis by ISPs and network engineers to support capacity
planning, trends analysis, and characterization of workloads in a network service provider
environment.
Cflowd is also useful for traffic engineering, network planning and analysis, network monitoring,
developing user profiles, data warehousing and mining, as well as security-related investigations.
Collected information can be viewed several ways such as in port, AS, or network matrices, and
pure flow structures. The amount of data stored depends on the cflowd configurations.
Cflowd maintains a list of data flows through a router. A flow is a uni-directional traffic stream
defined by several characteristics such as source and destination IP addresses, source and
destination ports, inbound interface, IP protocol and TOS bits.
When a router receives a packet for which it currently does not have a flow entry, a flow structure
is initialized to maintain state information regarding that flow, such as the number of bytes
exchanged, IP addresses, port numbers, AS numbers, etc. Each subsequent packet matching the
same parameters of the flow contribute to the byte and packet count of the flow until the flow is
terminated and exported to a collector for storage.
For the 7450 guides, it is only supported on the ESS-7 and 12 if mixed mode is enabled.
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