Dell EMC SmartFabric OS10 User Guide Release 10.5.0

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
• Only data ports support sFlow collector
• OS10 supports a maximum of two sFlow collectors
• OS10 does not support sFlow on SNMP, VLAN, 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

sFlow monitoring consists of an sFlow agent embedded in the device and an sFlow collector:

• The sFlow agent resides anywhere within the path of the packet. The agent 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 packet sampling.
• The sFlow collector analyses the datagrams received from different devices and produces a network-wide view of traffic flows.