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Chapter 26: sFlow
342
Overview
The sFlow agent allows the switch to gather data about the traffic on the
ports and to send the data to sFlow collectors on your network for
analysis. You can use the information to monitor the performance of your
network or identify traffic bottlenecks.
The sFlow agent can gather two types of information about the traffic on
the ports of the switch:
Ingress packet samples
Packet counters
Ingress Packet
Samples
The sFlow agent can capture ingress packets on ports and send copies of
the packets to sFlow collectors on your network for analysis. Depending
on the capabilities of the collectors, packets can be scrutinized for source
and destination MAC or IP addresses, protocol type, length, and so forth.
Packet sampling is activated by specifying sampling rates on the ports.
This value defines the number of ingress packets from which the agent
samples one packet. For example, a sampling rate of 1000 on a port
prompts the agent to send one packet from every 1000 ingress packets to
the designated sFlow collector. Different ports can have different rates.
Packet Counters The agent can also gather and send data to a collector about overall
information regarding the status and performance of the ports, such as
speeds and status, and the statistics from the packet counters. The
counters contain the number and types of ingress and egress packets
handled by the ports since the switch or the counters were last reset. The
agent can gather and send the following port status and counter
information to a collector on your network:
Port number
Port type
Speed
Direction
Status
Number of ingress and egress octets
Number of ingress and egress unicast packets
Number of ingress and egress multicast packets
Number of ingress and egress broadcast packets
Number of ingress and egress discarded packets
Number of ingress and egress packets with errors
Number of ingress packets with unknown protocols