NetFlow is typically used for several key customer applications, including the following:

• Network monitoring. NetFlow data enables extensive near-real-time network monitoring capabilities. Flow-based analysis techniques are used by network operators to visualize traffic patterns associated with individual routers and switches and network-wide traffic patterns (providing aggregate traffic or application-based views) to provide proactive problem detection, efficient troubleshooting, and rapid problem resolution.
• Application monitoring and profiling. NetFlow data enables network managers to gain a detailed time-based view of application usage over the network. This information is used to plan, understand new services, and allocate network and application resources (for example, web server sizing and VoIP deployment) to meet customer demands responsively.
• User monitoring and profiling. NetFlow data enables network engineers to gain detailed understanding of customer and user use of network and application resources. This information may then be used to efficiently plan and allocate access, backbone, and application resources and to detect and resolve potential security and policy violations.
• Network planning. NetFlow can be used to capture data over a long period of time, affording the opportunity to track and anticipate network growth and plan upgrades to increase the number of routing devices, ports, and higher-bandwidth interfaces. NetFlow services data optimizes network planning for peering, backbone upgrades, and routing policy. NetFlow helps to minimize the total cost of network operations while maximizing network performance, capacity, and reliability. NetFlow detects unwanted WAN traffic, validates bandwidth and quality of service (QoS), and allows the analysis of new network applications. NetFlow will give you valuable information to reduce the cost of operating your network.
• Security analysis. NetFlow identifies and classifies distributed denial of service (dDoS) attacks, viruses, and worms in real time. Changes in network behavior indicate anomalies that are clearly demonstrated in Flexible NetFlow data. The data is also a valuable forensic tool to understand and replay the history of security incidents.
• Billing and accounting. NetFlow data provides fine-grained metering (for instance, flow data includes details such as IP addresses, packet and byte counts, time stamps, type of service (ToS), and application ports) for highly flexible and detailed resource utilization accounting. Service providers may use the information for billing based on time of day, bandwidth usage, application usage, quality of service, and so on. Enterprise customers may use the information for departmental charge back or cost allocation for resource utilization.
• NetFlow data warehousing and data mining. NetFlow data (or derived information) can be warehoused for later retrieval and analysis in support of proactive marketing and customer service programs (for example, discovering which applications and services are being used by internal and external users and targeting them for improved service, advertising, and so on). In addition, Flexible NetFlow data gives market researchers access to the "who," "what," "where," and "how long" information relevant to enterprises and service providers.

Original NetFlow and Flexible NetFlow both use the concept of flows. A flow is defined as a stream of packets between a given source and a given destination.

Original NetFlow and Flexible NetFlow both use the values in key fields in IP datagrams, such as the IP source or destination address and the source or destination transport protocol port, as the criteria for determining when a new flow must be created in the cache while network traffic is being monitored. When the value of the data in the key field of a datagram is unique with respect to the flows that already exist, a new flow is created.

Original NetFlow and Flexible NetFlow both use nonkey fields as the criteria for identifying fields from which data is captured from the flows. The flows are populated with data that is captured from the values in the nonkey fields.

The figure below is an example of the process for inspecting packets and creating flow records in the cache. In this example, two unique flows are created in the cache because different values are in the source and destination IP address key fields.

Figure 1

Packet Inspection

Original NetFlow uses a fixed seven tuples of IP information to identify a flow. Flexible NetFlow allows the flow to be user defined. The benefits of Flexible NetFlow include:

• High-capacity flow recognition, including scalability and aggregation of flow information.
• Enhanced flow infrastructure for security monitoring and dDoS detection and identification.
• New information from packets to adapt flow information to a particular service or operation in the network. The flow information available will be customizable by Flexible NetFlow users.
• Extensive use of Cisco's flexible and extensible NetFlow Version 9 export format.
• A comprehensive IP accounting feature that can be used to replace many accounting features, such as IP accounting, Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Policy Accounting, and persistent caches.

Original NetFlow allows you to understand the activities in the network and thus to optimize network design and reduce operational costs. Flexible NetFlow allows you to understand network behavior with more efficiency, with specific flow information tailored for various services used in the network. The following are some example applications for a Flexible NetFlow feature:

• Flexible NetFlow enhances Cisco NetFlow as a security monitoring tool. For instance, new flow keys can be defined for packet length or MAC address, allowing users to search for a specific type of attack in the network.
• Flexible NetFlow allows you to quickly identify how much application traffic is being sent between hosts by specifically tracking TCP or UDP applications by the class of service (CoS) in the packets.
• The accounting of traffic entering a Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) or IP core network and its destination for each next hop per class of service. This capability allows the building of an edge-to-edge traffic matrix.

The figure below is an example of how Flexible NetFlow might be deployed in a network.

Figure 2

Typical Deployment for Flexible NetFlow

Flexible NetFlow consists of components that can be used together in several variations to perform traffic analysis and data export. The user-defined flow records and the component structure of Flexible NetFlow facilitates the creation of various configurations for traffic analysis and data export on a networking device with a minimum number of configuration commands. Each flow monitor can have a unique combination of flow record, flow exporter, and cache type. If you change a parameter such as the destination IP address for a flow exporter, it is automatically changed for all the flow monitors that use the flow exporter. The same flow monitor can be used in conjunction with different flow samplers to sample the same type of network traffic at different rates on different interfaces. The following sections provide more information on Flexible NetFlow components:

• Records
  
• Flow Monitors
  
• Flow Exporters
  
• Flow Samplers
  

Flexible NetFlow can be used as a network attack detection tool with capabilities to track all parts of the IP header and even packet sections and characterize this information into flows. Security monitoring systems can analyze Flexible NetFlow data, and upon finding an issue in the network, create a virtual bucket or virtual cache that will be configured to track specific information and identify details about the attack pattern or worm propagation. The capability to create caches dynamically with specific information combined with input filtering (for example, filtering all flows to a specific destination) makes Flexible NetFlow a powerful security monitoring tool.

One common type of attack occurs when TCP flags are used to flood open TCP requests to a destination server (for example, a SYN flood attack). The attacking device sends a stream of TCP SYNs to a given destination address but never sends the ACK in response to the servers SYN-ACK as part of the TCP three-way handshake. The flow information needed for a security detection server requires the tracking of three key fields: destination address or subnet, TCP flags, and packet count. The security detection server may be monitoring general Flexible NetFlow information, and this data may trigger a detailed view of this particular attack by the Flexible NetFlow dynamically creating a new flow monitor in the router's configuration. The new flow monitor might include input filtering to limit what traffic is visible in the Flexible NetFlow cache along with the tracking of the specific information to diagnose the TCP-based attack. In this case the user may want to filter all flow information to the server destination address or subnet to limit the amount of information the security detection server needs to evaluate. If the security detection server decided it understood this attack, it might then program another flow monitor to collect and export payload information or sections of packets to take a deeper look at a signature within the packet. This example is just one of many possible ways that Flexible NetFlow can be used to detect security incidents.

The table below provides a feature-by-feature comparison of original NetFlow and Flexible NetFlow.