Analyzing flow data with NetFlow gives you comprehensive insight into network traffic flow and volume. It’s an efficient and popular way of gaining both a broad and detailed picture of what’s happening in your network.

An example of a collector and analyzer is the WhatsUp Flow Monitor coupled with Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold to provide real-time monitoring, alerting, and forensic analysis to flow data captured by the WhatsUp Flow Publisher.NetFlow, developed by Cisco, is a network protocol designed for the collection of IP traffic information and the monitoring of network traffic. The collector and analyzer can be a single product, or may be implemented by two or more products. The exporter can be either an included function of the network device, such as the NetFlow export functionality on Cisco routers, or it can be an external publisher configured to monitor one or more interfaces on the device, such as the WhatsUp Flow Publisher. NetFlow analyzer analyzes the NetFlow records for information of interest, which may include bandwidth usage, policy adherence, and forensic research.NetFlow collector collects the records sent from the exporter, stores them in a local database and forwards the records to an analyzer.NetFlow exporter observes packet data and creates records from the monitored network traffic and transmits that data to the NetFlow collector.To capture, transmit and analyze NetFlow data the following NetFlow enabled components must be in place: This flow data must be captured from the network traffic, converted to a standard NetFlow record format, exported to a collector for aggregation, and then analyzed by the proper application to provide information useful in the analysis, planning and management of the network.

NetFlow as a protocol provides a means of collecting flow data from a network device and forwarding that data to a collector.

Network flow analyzer