sFlowsFlow is a standard-based sampling technology embedded within switches and routers which is used to monitor network traffic. It isdesigned to provide traffic monitoring for high-speed networks with many switches and routers.Topics:• Overview• Implementation Information• Enabling Extended sFlow• Enabling and Disabling sFlow on an Interface• Enabling sFlow Max-Header Size Extended• sFlow Show Commands• Configuring Specify Collectors• Changing the Polling Intervals• Back-Off Mechanism• sFlow on LAG ports• Enabling Extended sFlowOverviewThe Dell Networking Operating System (OS) supports sFlow version 5.sFlow is a standard-based sampling technology embedded within switches and routers which is used to monitor network traffic. It isdesigned to provide traffic monitoring for high-speed networks with many switches and routers. sFlow uses two types of sampling:• Statistical packet-based sampling of switched or routed packet flows.• Time-based sampling of interface counters.The sFlow monitoring system consists of an sFlow agent (embedded in the switch/router) and an sFlow collector. The sFlow agent residesanywhere within the path of the packet and combines the flow samples and interface counters into sFlow datagrams and forwards them tothe sFlow collector at regular intervals. The datagrams consist of information on, but not limited to, packet header, ingress and egressinterfaces, sampling parameters, and interface counters.Application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) typically complete packet sampling. sFlow collector analyses the sFlow datagrams receivedfrom different devices and produces a network-wide view of traffic flows.Implementation InformationDell Networking sFlow is designed so that the hardware sampling rate is per line card port-pipe and is decided based on all the ports in thatport-pipe.If you do not enable sFlow on any port specifically, the global sampling rate is downloaded to that port and is to calculate the port-pipe’slowest sampling rate. This design supports the possibility that sFlow might be configured on that port in the future. Back-off is triggeredbased on the port-pipe’s hardware sampling rate.For example, if port 1 in the port-pipe has sFlow configured with a 16384 sampling rate while port 2 in the port-pipe has sFlow configuredbut no sampling rate set, the system applies a global sampling rate of 512 to port 2. The hardware sampling rate on the port-pipe is then setat 512 because that is the lowest configured rate on the port-pipe. When a high traffic situation occurs, a back-off is triggered and the50852 sFlow
