sflow vs netflow

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nagnerd
Posts: 7
Joined: Thu Nov 17, 2022 10:10 am

sflow vs netflow

Post by nagnerd »

What's the difference between sflow and netflow? Is one better than the other?
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swolf
Developer
Posts: 294
Joined: Tue Jun 06, 2017 9:48 am

Re: sflow vs netflow

Post by swolf »

Hi @nagnerd, thanks for reaching out.

Technically, Netflow is a proprietary protocol introduced by Cisco for their routers back in the 90's. While there's nothing that stops other companies from being interoperable with Netflow, they usually indicate that their networking equipment uses a "similar" protocol under a different name (sflow, jflow, IPFIX, whatever). sflow ("sampled flow") in particular is slightly different in that only some data is sent along to the collector/analysis server.

I wouldn't say one is better or worse, it's mostly about what your device manufacturer and analysis tooling can support.

Please let me know if you have any other questions or concerns

-Sebastian Wolf
As of May 25th, 2018, all communications with Nagios Enterprises and its employees are covered under our new Privacy Policy
ssunga
Posts: 32
Joined: Wed Aug 09, 2023 10:38 am

Re: sflow vs netflow

Post by ssunga »

Hey @nagnerd,

To add to this:

sflow is a stateless protocol that uses statistical sampling. It captures a portion of packets from the traffic flow at regular intervals, typically one out of every N packets (where N is a configurable sampling rate). Due to this sampling nature, sFlow tends to use fewer resources on network devices. sFlow is more common in high-speed, high-volume networks where capturing every packet is impractical due to performance considerations.

NetFlow is a stateful protocol that captures information about IP flows. It records all packets in a flow and exports that data to a collector. It can be more resource intensive because it maintains flow information, but the tradeoff is it can give you a more detailed view of traffic. That would be useful in accounting and billing, traffic analysis, and network planning because you'd want more detailed information - basically, environments where detailed traffic profiling and long-term historical analysis is required.
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