Reference Guide

sFlow
sFlow is a standard-based sampling technology embedded within switches and routers that monitors network traffic. It provides
traffic monitoring for high-speed networks with many switches and routers.
● OS10 supports sFlow version 5
● sFlow collector is supported only on data ports
● A maximum of two sFlow collectors
● OS10 does not support sFlow on SNMP, VLAN, VRF, tunnel interfaces, extended sFlow, backoff mechanism, and egress
sampling
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 device) and an sFlow collector:
● The sFlow agent resides anywhere within the path of the packet and combines the flow samples and interface counters
into sFlow datagrams and forwards them to the sFlow collector at regular intervals. The datagrams consist of information
on, but not limited to, the packet header, ingress and egress interfaces, sampling parameters, and interface counters.
Application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) handle the packet sampling.
● The sFlow collector analyses the datagrams received from different devices and produces a network-wide view of traffic
flows.
Enable sFlow
You can enable sFlow either on all interfaces globally or on a specific set of interfaces. The system displays an error message if
you try to enable sFlow on both modes at a time.
If you configure sFlow only on a set of interfaces, any further change to the sFlow-enabled ports triggers the sFlow agent to
restart. This results in a gap in the polling counter statistics of 30 seconds and the sFlow counters are reset on all sFlow-enabled
ports.
When you enable sFlow on a port-channel:
● When you enable sFlow in Per-Interface mode, the counter statistics of sFlow-enabled ports reset to zero when you add a
new member port or remove an existing member port from any sflow enabled port-channel group.
● sFlow counter statistics that are individually reported for the port members of a port-channel data source are accurate.
Counter statistics reported for the port-channel may not be accurate. To calculate the correct counters for a port-channel
data source, add together the counter statistics of the individual port members.
Enable or disable sFlow globally
sFlow is disabled globally by default.
● Enable sFlow globally on all interfaces in CONFIGURATION mode.
sflow enable all-interfaces
● Disable sFlow in CONFIGURATION mode.
no sflow
Enable or disable sFlow on a specific interface
● Enable sFlow in CONFIGURATION mode.
sflow enable
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