

NetFlow is a Cisco proprietary network protocol used for flow analysis. For instance, when we watch live streaming video, packets sent from server to PC create a flow as they are part of the same conversation. What is a Flow?Ī flow is a sequence of packets sharing the same properties that are sent between a sending and a receiving hosts. top talkers, traffic by protocols, bandwidth usage etc.).

In contrast to packet analysis, flow analysis is about collecting the metadata from network traffic used for statistical purpose (e.g. Packet analysis is suitable for the in depth analysis of a specific conversation as the full packet header along with the payload is collected. Packet Analysis uses packet capturing technologies such as SPAN, RSPAN, ERSPAN to get raw copies of traffic. Packet analysis and flow analysis are two technologies that we can choose from when we perform traffic analysis on the network. Network Traffic Analysis is used to deduce information from patterns collected during network monitoring. Network monitoring is a systematic effort to monitor parameters of a computer network in order to detect issues that degrade network performance.
