Sflow Configuration; Sflow Overview; Introduction To Sflow; Operation Of Sflow - 3Com 4500G Family Configuration Manual

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sFlow Configuration

When configuring sFlow, go to these sections for information you are interested in:

sFlow Overview

Configuring sFlow
Displaying and Maintaining sFlow
sFlow Configuration Example
Troubleshooting sFlow Configuration
sFlow Overview

Introduction to sFlow

Sampled Flow (sFlow) is a traffic monitoring technology mainly used to collect and analyze traffic
statistics.
The sFlow system involves an sFlow agent embedded in a device and a remote sFlow collector. The
sFlow agent collects traffic statistics and packets from the sFlow enabled ports on the device,
encapsulates the information into sFlow packets, and sends the packets to the sFlow collector. The
sFlow collector analyzes the sFlow packets and displays the results.
sFlow has the following two sampling mechanisms:
Packet-based sampling: An sFlow enabled port samples one packet out of a configurable number
of packets passing through it.
Time-based sampling: The sFlow agent samples the statistics of all sFlow enabled ports at a
configurable interval.
As a traffic monitoring technology, sFlow has the following advantages:
Supporting traffic monitoring on Gigabit and higher-speed networks.
Providing scalability to allow one sFlow collector to monitor multiple or more sFlow agents.
Implementing the low-cost sFlow agent.
Currently, only the sFlow agent function is supported on 3Com Switch 4500G family.

Operation of sFlow

sFlow operates as follows:
1) With sFlow enabled, a physical port encapsulates sampled data into packets and sends them to
the sFlow agent.
2) The sFlow agent periodically collects the statistics of all sFlow enabled ports.
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