Flow Accounting

VyOS supports flow-accounting for both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic. The system acts as a flow exporter, and you are free to use it with any compatible collector.

Flows can be exported via two different protocols: NetFlow (versions 5, 9 and 10/IPFIX) and sFlow. Additionally, you may save flows to an in-memory table internally in a router.

Warning

You need to disable the in-memory table in production environments! Using IMT may lead to heavy CPU overloading and unstable flow-accounting behavior.

NetFlow / IPFIX

NetFlow is a feature that was introduced on Cisco routers around 1996 that provides the ability to collect IP network traffic as it enters or exits an interface. By analyzing the data provided by NetFlow, a network administrator can determine things such as the source and destination of traffic, class of service, and the causes of congestion. A typical flow monitoring setup (using NetFlow) consists of three main components:

  • exporter: aggregates packets into flows and exports flow records towards one or more flow collectors

  • collector: responsible for reception, storage and pre-processing of flow data received from a flow exporter

  • application: analyzes received flow data in the context of intrusion detection or traffic profiling, for example

For connectionless protocols as like ICMP and UDP, a flow is considered complete once no more packets for this flow appear after configurable timeout.

NetFlow is usually enabled on a per-interface basis to limit load on the router components involved in NetFlow, or to limit the amount of NetFlow records exported.

Configuration

In order for flow accounting information to be collected and displayed for an interface, the interface must be configured for flow accounting.

set system flow-accounting interface <interface>

Configure and enable collection of flow information for the interface identified by <interface>.

You can configure multiple interfaces which whould participate in flow accounting.

Note

Will be recorded only packets/flows on incoming direction in configured interfaces by default.

By default, recorded flows will be saved internally and can be listed with the CLI command. You may disable using the local in-memory table with the command:

set system flow-accounting disable-imt

If you need to sample also egress traffic, you may want to configure egress flow-accounting:

set system flow-accounting enable-egress

Internally, in flow-accounting processes exist a buffer for data exchanging between core process and plugins (each export target is a separated plugin). If you have high traffic levels or noted some problems with missed records or stopping exporting, you may try to increase a default buffer size (10 MiB) with the next command:

set system flow-accounting buffer-size <buffer size>

In case, if you need to catch some logs from flow-accounting daemon, you may configure logging facility:

set system flow-accounting syslog-facility <facility>

TBD

Flow Export

In addition to displaying flow accounting information locally, one can also exported them to a collection server.

NetFlow

set system flow-accounting netflow version <version>

There are multiple versions available for the NetFlow data. The <version> used in the exported flow data can be configured here. The following versions are supported:

  • 5 - Most common version, but restricted to IPv4 flows only

  • 9 - NetFlow version 9 (default)

  • 10 - IPFIX as per RFC 3917

set system flow-accounting netflow server <address>

Configure address of NetFlow collector. NetFlow server at <address> can be both listening on an IPv4 or IPv6 address.

set system flow-accounting netflow source-ip <address>

IPv4 or IPv6 source address of NetFlow packets

set system flow-accounting netflow engine-id <id>

NetFlow engine-id which will appear in NetFlow data. The range is 0 to 255.

set system flow-accounting netflow sampling-rate <rate>

Use this command to configure the sampling rate for flow accounting. The system samples one in every <rate> packets, where <rate> is the value configured for the sampling-rate option. The advantage of sampling every n packets, where n > 1, allows you to decrease the amount of processing resources required for flow accounting. The disadvantage of not sampling every packet is that the statistics produced are estimates of actual data flows.

Per default every packet is sampled (that is, the sampling rate is 1).

set system flow-accounting netflow timeout expiry-interval <interval>

Specifies the interval at which Netflow data will be sent to a collector. As per default, Netflow data will be sent every 60 seconds.

You may also additionally configure timeouts for different types of connections.

set system flow-accounting netflow max-flows <n>

If you want to change the maximum number of flows, which are tracking simultaneously, you may do this with this command (default 8192).

sFlow

set system flow-accounting sflow server <address>

Configure address of sFlow collector. sFlow server at <address> can be an IPv4 or IPv6 address. But you cannot export to both IPv4 and IPv6 collectors at the same time!

set system flow-accounting sflow sampling-rate <rate>

Enable sampling of packets, which will be transmitted to sFlow collectors.

set system flow-accounting sflow agent-address <address>

Configure a sFlow agent address. It can be IPv4 or IPv6 address, but you must set the same protocol, which is used for sFlow collector addresses. By default, using router-id from BGP or OSPF protocol, or the primary IP address from the first interface.

Example:

NetFlow v5 example:

set system flow-accounting netflow engine-id 100
set system flow-accounting netflow version 5
set system flow-accounting netflow server 192.168.2.10 port 2055

Operation

Once flow accounting is configured on an interfaces it provides the ability to display captured network traffic information for all configured interfaces.

show flow-accounting interface <interface>

Show flow accounting information for given <interface>.

vyos@vyos:~$ show flow-accounting interface eth0
IN_IFACE    SRC_MAC            DST_MAC            SRC_IP                     DST_IP             SRC_PORT    DST_PORT  PROTOCOL      TOS    PACKETS    FLOWS    BYTES
----------  -----------------  -----------------  ------------------------  ---------------  ----------  ----------  ----------  -----  ---------  -------  -------
eth0        00:53:01:a8:28:ac  ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff  192.0.2.2                 255.255.255.255        5678        5678  udp             0          1        1      178
eth0        00:53:01:b2:2f:34  33:33:ff:00:00:00  fe80::253:01ff:feb2:2f34  ff02::1:ff00:0            0           0  ipv6-icmp       0          2        1      144
eth0        00:53:01:1a:b4:53  33:33:ff:00:00:00  fe80::253:01ff:fe1a:b453  ff02::1:ff00:0            0           0  ipv6-icmp       0          1        1       72
eth0        00:53:01:b2:22:48  00:53:02:58:a2:92  192.0.2.100               192.0.2.14            40152          22  tcp            16         39        1     2064
eth0        00:53:01:c8:33:af  ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff  192.0.2.3                 255.255.255.255        5678        5678  udp             0          1        1      154
eth0        00:53:01:b2:22:48  00:53:02:58:a2:92  192.0.2.100               192.0.2.14            40006          22  tcp            16        146        1     9444
eth0        00:53:01:b2:22:48  00:53:02:58:a2:92  192.0.2.100               192.0.2.14                0           0  icmp          192         27        1     4455
show flow-accounting interface <interface> host <address>

Show flow accounting information for given <interface> for a specific host only.

vyos@vyos:~$ show flow-accounting interface eth0 host 192.0.2.14
IN_IFACE    SRC_MAC            DST_MAC            SRC_IP       DST_IP        SRC_PORT    DST_PORT  PROTOCOL      TOS    PACKETS    FLOWS    BYTES
----------  -----------------  -----------------  -----------  ----------  ----------  ----------  ----------  -----  ---------  -------  -------
eth0        00:53:01:b2:22:48  00:53:02:58:a2:92  192.0.2.100  192.0.2.14       40006          22  tcp            16        197        2    12940
eth0        00:53:01:b2:22:48  00:53:02:58:a2:92  192.0.2.100  192.0.2.14       40152          22  tcp            16         94        1     4924
eth0        00:53:01:b2:22:48  00:53:02:58:a2:92  192.0.2.100  192.0.2.14           0           0  icmp          192         36        1     5877