Introduction

The Flowmon solution comprises of Flowmon Probe, Flowmon Collector, and Flowmon extension modules.

Probe Features

The Flowmon Probe is a non-invasive appliance that monitors the network IP traffic and transforms it into standard NetFlow v5/v9 or IPFIX data. This data is exported to the Flowmon Monitoring Center or any third-party collector for further analysis, viewing, and reporting. The provided statistics are necessary for network monitoring, security, troubleshooting, IP accounting and billing, capacity planning, user and application monitoring, or traffic engineering.

Although most high-end network routers support NetFlow, they often use input packet sampling and the number of supported packets/sec or flows/sec is limited, unless additional, specialized, and costly network boards are used. Furthermore, router-based probes have fixed placement and layer 3 visibility makes them the target of attacks. Also, the provided statistics are not reliable enough for billing or security applications. Moreover, enabling NetFlow monitoring slows down the performance of the routers.

The Flowmon Probe overcomes the limitations of router-based probes and offers a standalone, L2- and L3-invisible, scalable, and high-performance solution for network monitoring. It allows you to generate flow statistics in environments where NetFlow exports are not available or not feasible. Typical examples are networks without NetFlow support, busy routers, L2 switches, or VPNs.

The Flowmon Probe is the complete off-the-shelf appliance with easy configuration and installation. It integrates basic NetFlow data collecting, viewing, and analyzing which enables quick evaluation and usage of the NetFlow technology for all – network and security operators, administrators, and managers.

• High-performance standalone NetFlow v5/v9 or IPFIX probe

• Standard and hardware accelerated models

• Wire-speed processing with no packet loss

• Up to 2x 100Gbps, 2x 40Gbps, 4x 10Gbps, or 4x 10/100/1000 monitoring interfaces

• Compact (1U or 2U) and maintenance-free network appliance

• Non-invasive - simply plug into mirror port or TAP

• L2/L3 invisible device with IPv4, IPv6, VLAN, and MPLS support

• Devices can be monitored by SNMP tools (for example, Zabbix, Nagios, and so on)

• Built-in collector for quick technology evaluation

• Fully compatible with all major NetFlow collectors

Collector Features

The Flowmon Collector is a stand-alone server dedicated to collection, long-term storage, and analysis of NetFlow/IPFIX/sFlow statistics from Flowmon probes. For this purpose, it is equipped with a huge disk capacity with RAID support. Network monitoring with multiple probes and one or more collectors is a professional solution for medium to large businesses. The Flowmon Monitoring Center is used for storing and analyzing the flow data on the collector. Thanks to special filters, users are able to select particular communications based on source or destination host, used protocol, start time, and many other properties acquirable by flow technology. To make the network supervision more effective, those tools also offer automatic notification and alert sending in cases of anomalies or suspicious traffic.

The Flowmon Collector offers the following features:

• High-performance collector for gathering data from multiple Flowmon Probes

• Large disk capacity enables storing of long-term statistics

• Hardware RAID support (not available on virtual appliances)

• Best price/performance ratio in the industry

• Optimized for fast searching in statistic data

• Simple configuration using an intuitive web interface

Fully compatible with all major NetFlow, IPFIX, sFlow generators (probes, routers, and so on).

Flowmon Architecture

The Flowmon Probe integrates a standard or accelerated Flowmon monitoring port, Configuration Center, and (if enabled by the license) Flowmon Monitoring Center. The Flowmon monitoring port captures the network traffic, computes the flow statistics, and exports the NetFlow/IPFIX data. The Configuration Center enables easy remote configuration of the probe. The Flowmon Monitoring Center enables the collecting, viewing, and analysis of the flow data (NetFlow, IPFIX, sFlow).

The NetFlow/IPFIX data exported by the Flowmon monitoring port can be collected by the Flowmon Monitoring Center or by any other NetFlow/IPFIX collector. The Flowmon Monitoring Center comes in two versions. A built-in version is integrated into the Flowmon Probe and enables the customer to quickly evaluate the flow technology. A standalone version is implemented on the dedicated server (Flowmon Collector) and offers a professional solution for high-throughput networks.

The Flowmon Probe further supports extension modules (for example, Flowmon ADS, Flowmon DDoS Defender, Flowmon Application Performance Monitoring, and so on). See www.flowmon.com for more details about our complete Flowmon solution.