Version

Argent AT All Versions

Date

Friday, 17 March 2023

Summary

Customers may request to have Argent collect and report on NetFlow data generated by their network devices.

Technical Background

If NetFlow is turned on a network device that device will record every packet of data flowing through it.

The NetFlow data contains information about which machines are talking to each other and what type of traffic.

The NetFlow data can be sent to the customer’s Argent for SNMP installation where it can be stored in the Argent database for reporting.

A customer may turn this on if they want to see which machines are generating the most traffic on their network (for example, user Bob Smith’s workstation is generating a lot of http web traffic to and from a web server, etc.)

The trade-off is that the NetFlow traffic contains a large amount of data.

For many customers the Device Magic Port Bandwidth Utilization Rules in Argent for SNMP meet their needs of being able to see which network devices are consuming the most bandwidth.

However a customer may also decide to turn on NetFlow if they want to see more granular details on exactly which end-user’s workstation is generating the bandwidth utilization traffic.

If a customer wants to use Argent to collect and report on NetFlow data, they can configure this in Argent for SNMP.

For instructions, please see the following article:
KBI 311438 How To Generate Bandwidth Usage Report Using NetFlow Data

It is recommended to allocate a separate Argent server and SQL database to handle the NetFlow data collection so that the large amount of traffic does not affect a customer’s normal Argent monitoring installation.