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Product Sugestion/Feature

Most companies have a DMZ and if they are like me they have some netflow resources in there. I have several internet pipes I would like to get flows from. Currently the only secure solution with SolarWinds would be to put a secondary netflow setup in my dmz.

What would be handy is if SW had a netflow forwarder/reflector so I could send flows to a secure DMZ resource and have it send those flows internally so they all show under my main NPM/NTA install.

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Accepted answers

All comments

jswan

I agree--this would be a great feature to have and a nice topic for a free tool. I would also like to see a raw-packet to NetFlow exporter from Solarwinds. There are other commercial and open-source tools out there that do this and it's an important part of a complete solution.

qle

An existing alternative would be to use nProbe to forward the flows to NTA. Although, it's not a SolarWinds product, it has been endorsed by them in the following blgo entry:

Orion NTA and nProbe: Analyzing bandwidth hogs without flow-capable network equipment

bmrad

Marked for the PM.

jswan

FYI, nProbe is not a flow forwarder; it reads a raw packet flow and creates flow export records based on it.

I believe the original poster was asking for the feature sometimes known as "flow fan-out": in this feature, a collector is able to reproduce flows and send them to other collectors, with the option to preserve or modify the original exporter's source IP address as necessary. This allows you to do things like get around the 2-collector limit on most Cisco devices, or centralize flow export in a DMZ as described by Donald.

chris.lapoint

Just to clarify, nProbe can serve as both collector (using raw packet flow) and as a proxy forwarder (receive flow data and forward).

See Proxy option in Using nProbe diagram: http://www.ntop.org/nProbe.html

jswan

Thanks Chris--I had never noticed that option before!

glencorecustomer

I am very interested by your comment. I am running into this 2-collector limit situation. I am stomped, in what to do to resolve this, I have multiple legs that I need to capture traffic from and then convert into netflow. Can you please elaborate on how I can get around the 2-collector limitation.

chris.lapoint

nProbe is ~$100 and provides both collector (using raw packet flow) and proxy forwarding (receive flow data and forward) capabilities. I'd recommend reviewing this solution to see if it would meet your needs.

See Proxy option in Using nProbe diagram: http://www.ntop.org/nProbe.html