Dell SmartFabric OS10 User Guide Release 10.5.3

sFlow®

sFlow® is a standard-based sampling technology embedded within switches and routers that monitors network traffic. It provides traffic monitoring for high-speed networks with many switches and routers.

• OS10 supports sFlow® version 5
• Only data ports support sFlow® collector
• OS10 supports a maximum of two sFlow® collectors
• OS10 does not support sFlow® on SNMP, VLAN, tunnel interfaces, extended sFlow®, backoff mechanism, and egress sampling

sFlow® uses two types of sampling:

• Statistical packet-based sampling of switched or routed packet flows
• Time-based sampling of interface counters

sFlow® monitoring consists of an sFlow® agent embedded in the device and an sFlow® collector:

• The sFlow® agent resides anywhere within the path of the packet. The agent combines the flow samples and interface counters into sFlow® datagrams and forwards them to the sFlow® collector at regular intervals. The datagrams consist of information on, but not limited to, the packet header, ingress and egress interfaces, sampling parameters, and interface counters. Application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) handle packet sampling.
• The sFlow® collector analyses the datagrams received from different devices and produces a network-wide view of traffic flows.

Configuration notes

Dell PowerSwitch S4200-ON Series:

Do not enable sFlow® on per-port basis.