IPFIX Fundamentals

Internet Protocol Flow Information eXport (IPFIX) is an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard of export for Internet Protocol flow information.

IPFIX monitors flows that pass an observation point. The switch organizes flows into a flow group, which is contained in an observation domain.

An IPFIX flow is a set of packets that pass an observation point in the network during a certain time interval. Packets that belong to a particular flow have a common set of properties. The switch defines each property using values from the following:

A packet belongs to a flow if it completely satisfies all defined properties of the flow.

The switch logically organizes flows into a flow group, which corresponds to a single observation point. A flow can belong to only 1 flow group. A flow group is a collection of packet flows that meet match criteria. Examples of flow groups are packets ingressing a specific physical port, or packets with a destination IP address belonging to a specific subnet.

A flow group is contained in an observation domain. The switch assigns the flow group to an observation domain. The observation domain has a unique observation domain ID that you can configure. You can configure only 1 observation domain.

The IPFIX solution consists of the following processes:

IPFIX is a push protocol. The Filtering Rules and Exporting processes periodically send IPFIX messages to configured receivers without interaction from the Collecting process.

IPFIX collects IPv4 flow information on the switch and conforms with the following:

Note

Note

IPFIX is not supported on OOB, Circuitless IP (CLIP), or VLAN Segmented Management Instance interfaces.