Network telemetry is generated per a network interface and is available disabled by default on all new LoadMaster deployments for firmware version 7.2.53 and above. To enable network telemetry navigate to the Network Telemetry menu item.

On Long Term Support (LTS) LoadMaster versions, or older versions of the LoadMaster that have been patched to a newer version, you may need to enable the network telemetry feature. To enable the network telemetry feature, click Network Telemetryin the main menu of the LoadMaster User Interface (UI) and click Install.

After you successfully install network telemetry on the LoadMaster, you should see a number of fields to configure on the Network Telemetry screen.

Note: Enabling Network Telemetry may impact performance throughput.

Details on each of these options are below:

  • IP address of Collector: Define the destination IP address or Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) and port number of your IPFIX collector (for example, 1.1.1.1:2055 or collector.local:3000). The IPFIX export runs over the UDP protocol and you must ensure that the collector is reachable over the network from the LoadMaster. Once you configure the collector IP address or FQDN you can validate the network connectivity by clicking Validate and clicking OK. Validation is based on a plain ICMP ping message and it validates the IP or FQDN (not the port).

Note: IPFIX is a plain text UDP packet stream. We recommend that it should only be exported over a secure network.

  • Active Timeout: Set the global active timeout value. The default value is 300.

    This setting ensures that very long flows will be exported in the specified time. The Timeout is checked for each incoming packet. If the corresponding flow is lasting longer than the specified timeout interval, it is deleted from the flow cache and exported to the collector.

  • Inactive Timeout: Set the global inactive timeout value. The default value is 30.

    This setting avoids keeping old, inactive flow records in the flow cache forever. When no packets belonging to the flow are observed for the specified timeout interval, the flow record is exported to collector

  • Export Protocol: The export protocol (IPFIX is currently the only selectable protocol).

  • Advanced settings: Enable/disable the check boxes here depending on what values you would like to collect.

Note: There are some check boxes in the Advanced settings section that are not possible to change at present. These will be configurable in a future release.

  • Activate export of Application Flow Data: Select the relevant interface (or interfaces) to collect IPFIX data for.

The network interface screens (for example, System Configuration > Network Setup > Interfaces > eth0) indicate if network telemetry monitoring is enabled or disabled for that interface (depending on what interfaces are selected on the Network Telemetry screen)

Note: To enable Network Telemetry on an interface, the interface must have an IP Address. Interfaces configured with Virtual LANs cannot have Network Telemetry enabled unless an IP Address is assigned.

Note: When two LoadMasters are operating as a HA pair, the Network Telemetry traffic will present from the physical address of the LoadMaster and not the shared address. It is necessary to create a profile for both the LoadMasters in the HA pair on the Flowmon Collector.