RBFS sFlow Technology

sFlow is a packet-sampling protocol for monitoring network traffic. sFlow enables continuous, real-time monitoring of network traffic across all interfaces simultaneously. It works by collecting samples of data packets and transmitting these samples in UDP datagrams to a central station called collector.

The sampling process is directly handled by the networking processing ASIC, which ensures accuracy in packet sampling and also significantly reduces the utilization of control-plane resources such as CPU, memory.

sFlow provides insights into network traffic that enables the network operator to promptly identify performance issues, security threats, or unusual traffic patterns. It allows real-time network monitoring across thousands of router ports simultaneously in a large scale environment.

Packet-Based Sampling:

Packet-based sampling is a technique for capturing a subset of network traffic by selecting one packet from a predefined number of packets. It generates a representative sample of the overall traffic without capturing every packet, which would be resource-intensive.

sFlow offers the following benefits:

Detect Network Issues and Manage Real-time Congestion: sFlow provides visibility into traffic patterns and enables the detection of anomalies such as misconfigurations, packet loss, and latency and it can track unauthorized activities. It can monitor traffic flow and bandwidth usage in real-time and provides data to manage network congestion.

For example, if an RBFS device suddenly experiences high latency or packet loss, sFlow provides information to pinpoint the source of the issue, such as a faulty interface or a congested port.

Types of Applications and Usage Patterns: By analyzing packet headers, sFlow can identify different types of network traffic such as web browsing, peer-to-peer (P2P), and DNS queries. This helps you to understand the types of applications and the amount of bandwidth that they consume. It allows to track changes in resource usage.

For example, if a network experiences an increase in P2P traffic, sFlow can provide the cause and the users or applications that are involved. With this data, network administrators can take appropriate actions.

Billing and Charge-Back: sFlow can provide resource usage data on per-application or per-user basis, which is useful for enterprise customers that require billing or internal charge-back. Enterprises can utilize this data to accurately bill customers or to allocate costs to internal departments based on the actual network consumption.

Route Profiling and Peering Optimization: sFlow captures detailed routing information and traffic distribution that helps to analyze traffic patterns across different routes and optimize peering agreements. It helps to refine routing policies and peering relationships.

For example, service providers can use sFlow data to determine which peering partners receive most of the traffic. This information allows you to modify their peering policies to improve performance.

Trends and Capacity Planning: sFlow can provide data on traffic trends and bandwidth usage that helps you to increase capacity.

For example, you can see a particular link is nearing its bandwidth capacity by analyzing sFlow data. With this data, you can plan an upgrade.

sFlow works by capturing sample network packets and collecting data periodically to give a representative view of the overall traffic. It does not capture every packet, instead, it samples a subset of packets. For example, it captures one packet in every N packets (where N is configurable) on a physical interface.

Not all features are necessarily supported on each hardware platform. Refer to the Platform Guide for the features and the sub-features that are or are not supported by each platform.