flowd does filter, but not stats. I use flow-report for that. You could also 
import into nfdump, I s'pose (what's one more pipe?).

However, you're right that the current nfdump (v1.6) does look promising. The 
docs suggest that you still need to identify exporters in advance with -n, but 
the source code reveals that if you just specify a base directory with -l, 
it'll store all exporters into a single set of files. I'll give it a try.

I do like how nfdump's author has done an admirable job adding v9/ipfix 
extended fields - ipv6, mpls labels, MAC addrs, vlan tags, etc. However, if one 
is looking at moving their code from flow-tools to something else, I wonder if 
it's not better to go with a package like Silk that fully-supports ipfix's 
flexible record, vendor-extensible format.

A minor strike is that nfdump lacks FT's *-count reports for identifying which 
IPs are talking to the most other IP's (not the most bytes, packets, or flows). 
Room for a patch there.

-Craig


On Wed, 27 Oct 2010, Ed Ravin wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 10:00:24AM -0500, Craig Weinhold wrote:
> > One unfortunate architectural flaw of nfdump is that each exporter
> > requires its own daemon running on a unique udp port. This doesn't
> > lend itself to MPLS WAN environments, where you might have hundreds
> > or thousands of exporters, changing daily.
> 
> Is that still the case with the current version?  The nfcapd man page
> describes an options for multiple exporters, which I haven't tried yet:
> 
>    -n <Ident,IP,base_directory>
>       Configures a netflow source named Ident and identified by source  IP
>       address  IP.   The  base directory for the flow files is base_direc-
>       tory. If a sub hierarchy is specified with -S the final directory is
>       concatenated   to   base_directory/sub_hierarchy.  Multiple  netflow
>       sources can be specified. All data is sent to the same  port  speci-
>       fied  by  -p.   Note: You must not mix -n option with -I and -l. Use
>       either syntax.
> 
> 
> > I've found 'flowd' to be a pretty good collector. It's closer in
> > spirit to flow-tools, but also uses tcpdump syntax.
> 
> But it's just a collector - if you want tools to summarize and report
> on the data, looks like you need to write them yourself?  I have a bunch
> of post-processing scripts summarizing our flow-tools data, so it was
> nice that they were easy to convert with nfdump.
> 
> Also, nfdump comes with a script to convert flow-tools data (actually,
> almost any printable network trace data) into its own format, so there's
> some limited backward compatibility.
> 
>       -- Ed
> 
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