Chapter 42 Sflow Commands - Alcatel-Lucent OmniSwitch 6850-48 Cli Reference Manual

sFlow is a network monitoring technology that gives visibility in to the activity of the network, by provid-
ing network usage information. It provides the data required to effectively control and manage the network
usage. sFlow is a sampling technology that meets the requirements for a network traffic monitoring solu-
tion.
sFlow provides a network-wide view of usage and active routes. It is used for measuring network traffic,
collecting, storing, and analyzing the traffic data. As it is scalable, that doesn't add significant network
load. sFlow is an industry standard with many vendors delivering products with this support. Some of the
applications of the sFlow data include:
•
Detecting, diagnosing, and fixing network problems
•
Real-time congestion management
•
Detecting unauthorized network activity
•
Usage accounting and billing
•
Understanding application mix
•
Route profiling and peer optimization
•
Capacity planning
sFlow is a sampling technology embedded within switches/routers. It provides the ability to monitor the
traffic flows. It requires an sFlow agent software process running as part of the switch software and a
sFlow collector which receives and analyses the monitored data. The sFlow collector makes use of SNMP
to communicate with an sFlow agent in order to configure sFlow monitoring on the device (switch).
An sFlow agent running on the switch/router combines interface counters and traffic flow (packet)
samples, preferably, on all the interfaces into sFlow datagrams that are sent across the network to an sFlow
collector.
Packet sampling on the switch/router is typically performed by the switching/routing ASICs, providing
wire-speed performance. In this case, an sFlow agent does very little processing, by packaging data into
sFlow datagrams that are immediately sent on network. This minimizes the memory and CPU utilization
by the sFlow agent.
MIB information for the sFlow commands is as follows:
Filename: AlcatelIND1PortMirMon.MIB
Module: Alcatel-IND1-PORT-MIRRORING-MONITORING-MIB
Filename: SFLOW_RFC3176.MIB
Module: SFLOW-MIB
OmniSwitch CLI Reference Guide
42 sFlow Commands
June 2012 page 42-1