http://www.plixer.com/blog/netflow/netflow-vs-sflow-for-network-monitoring-a... Regards, Benoit.
Can anyone on or off list give me some real world thoughts on sflow vs netflow for border routers? (multi-homed, BGP, straight v4 & v6 only for web hosting, no mpls, vpns, vlans, etc.)
Finding it hard to decipher the vendor version of the answer to that question. We use netflow v9 currently but are considering hardware that would be sflow. We don't use it for billing purposes, mostly for spotting malicious remote hosts doing things like scans, spotting traffic such as weird ports in use in either direction that warrant further investigation, watching for ddos/dos destinations to act on mitigation, or investigating the nature of unusual levels of traffic on switch ports that set off alarms. I'm concerned things like port scans, etc. won't be picked up by the NMS if fed by sflow due to the sampling nature, or similar concern if 500 ssh connections by the same remote host are sampled as 1 connection, etc. Of course these concerns were put in my head by someone interested in me continuing to use equipment that happens to output netflow data, hence me wanting some real people answers. :-)
Thanks!