Filter
Top Products
Configuring System Information 275
sFlow Sampler Configuration
The sFlow Agent collects a statistical packet-based sampling of the switched flows and sends them to the
configured receivers. A data source configured to collect flow samples is called a sampler.
Packet Flow Sampling
The Packet Flow Sampling mechanism carried out by each sFlow instance ensures that any packet
observed at a Data Source has an equal chance of being sampled, irrespective of the Packet Flow(s) to
which it belongs.
Packet Flow Sampling is accomplished as follows:
• When a packet arrives on an interface, the Network Device makes a filtering decision to determine
whether the packet should be dropped.
• If the packet is not filtered (dropped), a destination interface is assigned by the switching/routing
function.
• At this point, a decision is made on whether or not to sample the packet. The mechanism involves a
counter that is decremented with each packet. When the counter reaches zero, a sample is taken.
When a sample is taken, the counter that indicates how many packets to skip before taking the next
sample is reset. The value of the counter is set to a random integer where the sequence of random
integers used over time is the Sampling Rate.
To access the sFlow Sampler Configuration page, click System
→
sFlow
→
Sampler Configuration in the
navigation tree.
Table 6-64. sFlow Receiver Commands
CLI Command Description
sflow destination Configures sFlow collector parameters (owner string, receiver timeout,
ip address, and port).