[afnog] NetFlow Statistics Collector

[musoket at mtn.co.ug]

Thanks Jeroen and everyone who has sent me a suggestion. I'm looking through
the various suggestions and will update with my experience. My focus is more
on voip calls (origins, destinations, durations) and the quality of the
links. I'm looking for a non-commercial tool for now.

Cheers
Timothy

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeroen Massar [mailto:jeroen at unfix.org] 
Sent: Thursday, January 18, 2007 4:03 PM
To: Timothy Musoke
Cc: afnog at afnog.org
Subject: Re: [afnog] NetFlow Statistics Collector

musoket at mtn.co.ug wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I’m thinking of using CISCO’s NetFlow for traffic flow analysis and 
> collecting VOIP information. Has anyone out there used it? What 
> NetFlow collector would you recommend that I use on  a SUSE box to 
> process the data exported from the router?

NetFlow is great for general traffic measurements. But due to the nature of
the way it collects and aggregates data into flows it is useless for most
VoIP stats. It won't show you jitter, latency and a lot of other factors that
are important in that area.


For NetFlow apps check the following URL's:
http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/732/Tech/nmp/netflow/partners/commercial/ind
ex.shtml
http://netflow.caligare.com/applications.htm
http://www.switch.ch/tf-tant/floma/software.html

Every tool comes at a different price (some 100K+ US ;) and has different
things it can do. As such there is not an easy way to say "get this as it
does what you want". If you can tell what exactly you are trying to measure
or figure out, then I can probably hint you which apps are most suited for
your needs.

Most of them are SUSE based, most of them though are also commercial.
Check the SWITCH url for quite some non-commercial ones too.

Greets,
 Jeroen