sFlow Monitoring Using PRTG
Network Usage and Traffic Monitoring - the Easy Way
Using sFlow monitoring, PRTG Network Monitor gives you detailed insights into your network's bandwidth usage and helps you to improve network performance.
What is sFlow?
sFlow is an industry standard for monitoring computer networks. It provides detailed visibility into network usage and network traffic. PRTG Network Monitor offers full support of the sFlow protocol. Switches or routers which support sFlow can be monitored using PRTG's xFlow sensors (which besides sFLow also support Cisco's NetFlow standard). In sFlow enabled devices, network traffic data is pre-aggregated and can then be read and analyzed by PRTG.
Why Use sFlow Monitoring?
Bandwidth control is important as it helps you to detect a possible bandwidth bottleneck before it affects your company's productivity and lets you troubleshoot network issues in real-time. sFlow monitoring can also be used to monitor internet usage for billing purposes, to diagnose network usage trends, and to identify possible threats to your network.
Compared to other technologies such as packet sniffing or SNMP, sFlow monitoring has some important advantages: sFlow gives you detailed insights into bandwidth performance and network traffic, yet puts only very little CPU load on the server running PRTG.
Alternatives to sFlow Monitoring
If your switches and routers do not support sFlow (or NetFlow), you can use the following alternatives to monitor network traffic
- SNMP: shows you your total bandwidth usage and can be used for port monitoring, as it allows you to break down the monitoring data based on the respective port.
- Packet sniffing: this allows you to capture network traffic and gives you a level of detail comparable to sFlow, but puts far a far higher load on your server
PRTG Network Monitor
In addition to sFlow monitoring and other methods of bandwidth monitoring, PRTG also offers availability and performance monitoring. The network monitoring software tracks the uptime of network devices, monitors processes, free disk space, CPU load, etc. Depending on the capabilities of your network devices, PRTG can also monitor CPU temperature and many other factors. A free version of PRTG is available here. However, in order to use sFlow, you need one of the commercial licenses. A free {% trans "trial-days-valid" %}-day trial version, which supports NetFlow / sFlow sensors, can be downloaded here.