sflow

Sflow is a method for traffic flow monitoring in routed networks described in RFC 3176 under the title "A Method for Monitoring Traffic in Switched and Routed Networks".

Sflow uses a sampling technique in which samples are taken from the traffic at regular time intervals to reduce the measured data.

A Sflow agent uses two sampling mechanisms for statistical and time-based analysis, from which interface statistics are generated. With Sflow, data packets can be analyzed at all levels; the method is scalable and guarantees high measurement accuracies at the highest transmission rates. It has several advantages over Neetflow and RMON.