Collecting flow statistics

Overview

Cflowd statistics are based on sampled flows. A flow is a series of IP packets that share a common source, destination, and type of payload; for example, traffic that is specific to an application.

There are two types of Cflowd statistics:

• System Cflowd collects traffic on network interfaces, IES/VPRN L3 access interfaces, IES/VPRN tunnel interfaces and VPRN network interfaces.

• AA Cflowd collects traffic for AA applications and application groups associated with ISA-AA groups or partitions.

The NFM-P does not collect system Cflowd statistics, instead a third-party Cflowd collector is used. To collect System Cflowd statistics, you must enable Cflowd globally on an NE and configure Cflowd collectors on the NE. See “To enable and configure global Cflowd sampling on an NE” in the NSP NFM-P Classic Management User Guide for more information.

AA Cflowd statistics are collected from ISA-AA MDAs. You use the NFM-P to create AA Cflowd group policies to specify the AA Cflowd collection criteria. See “To configure an AA Cflowd group policy” in the NSP NFM-P Classic Management User Guide for information.

The NFM-P does not store AA accounting statistics in the NFM-P database. Instead, the NFM-P saves the statistics data in files for reporting in NSP Analytics reports, or for IPDR record processing by an OSS application. Forwarding to a target file server can also be configured.

See “Workflow to configure flow statistics collection” in the NSP NFM-P Statistics Management Guide for more information.

See the IPDR Reference for comprehensive information about AA Cflowd statistics types, counters, and IPDR file names for each statistics types.