15-115 sFlow ConfigurationThis chapter includes these sections:z sFlow Overviewz Configuring sFlowz Displaying and Maintaining sFlowz sFlow Configuration Examplez Troubleshooting sFlow ConfigurationsFlow OverviewIntroduction to sFlowSampled Flow (sFlow) is a traffic monitoring technology mainly used to collect and analyze trafficstatistics.The sFlow system involves an sFlow agent embedded in a device and a remote sFlow collector. ThesFlow agent collects traffic statistics and samples packets from the sFlow enabled ports on the device,encapsulates such information into sFlow packets, and sends the sFlow packets to the sFlow collector.The sFlow collector analyzes the sFlow packets and displays the results.sFlow has two sampling mechanisms:z Packet-based sampling: An sFlow enabled port samples one packet out of a configurable numberof packets passing through it.z Time-based sampling: The sFlow agent samples the statistics of all sFlow enabled ports at aconfigurable interval.As a traffic monitoring technology, sFlow has the following advantages:z Supporting traffic monitoring on Gigabit and higher-speed networks.z Providing scalability to allow one sFlow collector to monitor multiple or more sFlow agents.z Implementing the low-cost sFlow agent.Currently, only the sFlow agent function is supported on the device.Operation of sFlowsFlow operates as follows:1) With sFlow enabled, a physical port encapsulates sampled data into packets and sends them tothe sFlow agent.
