NetFlow Data Collection
WAE can collect and aggregate exported NetFlow and related flow measurements. These measurements can be used to construct accurate demand traffic data for WAE Design. Flow collection provides an alternative to the estimation of demand traffic from interfaces, LSPs, and other statistics using Demand Deduction. NetFlow gathers information about the traffic flow and helps to build traffic and demand matrix. Importing flow measurements is particularly useful when there is full or nearly full flow coverage of a network’s edge routers. Additionally, it is beneficial when accuracy of individual demands between external autonomous systems (ASes) is of interest.
Network data collected separately by NIMOs, including topology, BGP neighbors, and interface statistics, is combined with the flow measurements to scale flows and provide a complete demand mesh between both external autonomous systems and internal nodes.
WAE gathers the following types of data to build a network model with flows and their traffic measurements aggregated over time:
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Flow traffic using NetFlow, JFlow, CFlowd, IPFIX, and Netstream flows
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Interface traffic and BGP peers over SNMP
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BGP path attributes over peering sessions