Traffic Flow Monitoring with Cflowd Overview
Cflowd is a flow analysis tool, used for analyzing Flexible NetFlow (FNF) traffic data. It monitors traffic flowing through Cisco vEdge devices in the overlay network and exports flow information to a collector, where it can be processed by an IP Flow Information Export (IPFIX) analyzer. For a traffic flow, Cflowd periodically sends template reports to flow collector. These reports contain information about the flows and the data is extracted from the payload of these reports.
You can create a Cflowd template that defines the location of Cflowd collectors, how often sets of sampled flows are sent to the collectors, and how often the template is sent to the collectors (on Cisco SD-WAN Controllers and on Cisco SD-WAN Manager). You can configure a maximum of four Cflowd collectors per Cisco vEdge device. To have a Cflowd template take effect, apply it with the appropriate data policy.
You must configure at least one Cflowd template, but it need not contain any parameters. With no parameters, the data flow cache on the nodes is managed using default settings, and no flow export occurs.
Cflowd traffic flow monitoring is equivalent to FNF.
The Cflowd software implements Cflowd version 10, as specified in RFC 7011 and RFC 7012. Cflowd version 10 is also called the IP Flow Information Export (IPFIX) protocol.
Cflowd performs 1:1 sampling. Information about all flows is aggregated in the Cflowd records; flows are not sampled. Cisco vEdge devices do not cache any of the records that are exported to a collector.
Note |
NetFlow on Secure Internet Gateway (SIG) tunnels is not supported on Cisco vEdge devices. |
Cflowd and SNMP Comparison
Cflowd monitors service side traffic. Cflowd mainly monitors traffic from LAN to WAN, WAN to LAN, LAN to LAN and DIA. If you use Cflowd and SNMP to monitor traffic of LAN interface (input or output), then packets and bytes should be similar. The difference of bytes in SNMP starts from L2 header, but Cflowd starts from L3 header. However, if we use Cflowd and SNMP to monitor traffic of WAN interface (input or output), then packets or bytes are unlikely to be the same. All the traffic of WAN interfaces is not service side traffic. For example, Cflowd does not monitor BFD traffic, but SNMP does. The packets or bytes of Cflowd and SNMP traffic are not the same.