nanog mailing list archives
Re: Real world sflow vs netflow?
From: Richard A Steenbergen <ras () e-gerbil net>
Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2012 16:25:47 -0500
On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 11:52:28AM -0700, Peter Phaal wrote:
On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 11:19 AM, Joe Loiacono <jloiacon () csc com> wrote:OK, Well I guess I was thinking sFlow was primarily a switch oriented technology versus on a layer-3 peering router.The sFlow technology is a good fit for any device that performs a packet forwarding function (including routers) and the sFlow.org web site maintains a list of switches and routers that implement the technology,
Minus a whole pile of babble from people who don't actually know what a router vs layer 3 switch is...The difference at this point is mostly that NetFlow has provisions to allow exporting all data about an ENTIRE flow, whereas sFlow is designed to only take statistical samples for overall traffic analysis. Tracking an entire flow is much harder, it requires keeping state on the router, so if you only care about overall traffic analysis sampling is just fine. Originally sFlow introduced features like raw packet export (including layer 2 headers), and extensible formatting, which NetFlow later copied with v9 and v10/IPFIX. At this point they're "mostly" on the same footing technically, though sFlow does have a "counter export" feature which is essentially a "push" version of polling SNMP IF-MIB counters. Only Cisco and Juniper are still trying to push NetFlow though, sFlow has been adopted by nearly ehter other vendor at this point. Even some Juniper products, like EX (which is really Marvell ASICs with a JUNOS wrapper), support sFlow only. -- Richard A Steenbergen <ras () e-gerbil net> http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)
Current thread:
- Re: Real world sflow vs netflow?, (continued)
- Re: Real world sflow vs netflow? Peter Phaal (Sep 22)
- Re: Real world sflow vs netflow? Danny McPherson (Sep 23)
- Re: Real world sflow vs netflow? Dobbins, Roland (Sep 23)
- Re: Real world sflow vs netflow? Peter Phaal (Sep 23)
- Re: Real world sflow vs netflow? Dobbins, Roland (Sep 23)
- Re: Real world sflow vs netflow? Joe Loiacono (Sep 24)
- Re: Real world sflow vs netflow? Jeroen Massar (Sep 24)
- Re: Real world sflow vs netflow? Peter Phaal (Sep 24)
- Re: Real world sflow vs netflow? Joe Loiacono (Sep 24)
- Re: Real world sflow vs netflow? Peter Phaal (Sep 24)
- Re: Real world sflow vs netflow? Richard A Steenbergen (Sep 24)