netflowreceiver

README

Netflow receiver

Status
Stability	development: logs
Distributions	[]
Issues
Code Owners	@evan-bradley, @dlopes7

The netflow receiver can listen for netflow, sflow, and ipfix data and convert it to OpenTelemetry logs. The receiver is based on the goflow2 project.

This gives OpenTelemetry users the capability of monitoring network traffic, and answer questions like:

• Which protocols are passing through the network?
• Which servers and clients are producing the highest amount of traffic?
• What ports are involved in these network calls?
• How many bytes and packets are being sent and received?

Getting started

By default the receiver will listen for ipfix and netflow on port 2055. The receiver can be configured to listen on different ports and protocols.

Example configuration:

receivers:
  netflow:
    - scheme: netflow
      port: 2055
      sockets: 16
      workers: 32

processors:
  batch:
    send_batch_size: 2000
    timeout: 30s

exporters:
  debug:
    verbosity: detailed

service:
  pipelines:
    logs:
      receivers: [netflow]
      processors: [batch]
      exporters: [debug]
  telemetry:
    logs:
      level: debug

We recommend using the batch processor to reduce the number of log requests being sent to the exporter. The batch processor will batch log records together and send them in a single request to the exporter.

You would then configure your network devices to send netflow, sflow, or ipfix data to the Collector on the specified ports.

Configuration

Field	Description	Examples	Default
scheme	The type of flow data that to receive	sflow, netflow, flow	netflow
hostname	The hostname or IP address to bind to	localhost	0.0.0.0
port	The port to bind to	2055 or 6343	2055
sockets	The number of sockets to use	1	1
workers	The number of workers used to decode incoming flow messages	2	2
queue_size	The size of the incoming netflow packets queue	1000	1000000

Data format

The netflow data is standardized for the different schemas and is converted to OpenTelemetry logs following the semantic conventions

The output will adhere the format:

{
    "destination": {
        "address": "192.168.0.1",
        "port": 22
    },
    "flow": {
        "end": 1731073104662487000,
        "sampler_address": "192.168.0.2",
        "sequence_num": 49,
        "start": 1731073077662487000,
        "time_received": 1731073138662487000,
        "type": "NETFLOW_V5"
    },
    "io": {
        "bytes": 529,
        "packets": 378
    },
    "source": {
        "address": "192.168.0.3",
        "port": 40
    },
    "transport": "TCP",
    "type": "IPv4"
}

Documentation

Index

• func NewFactory() receiver.Factory
• type Config
  • func (cfg *Config) Validate() error
• type Listener

Functions

func NewFactory

func NewFactory() receiver.Factory

NewFactory creates a factory for netflow receiver.

Types

type Config

type Config struct {
	// The scheme defines the type of flow data that the listener will receive
	// The scheme must be one of sflow, netflow, or flow
	Scheme string `mapstructure:"scheme"`

	// The hostname or IP address that the listener will bind to
	Hostname string `mapstructure:"hostname"`

	// The port that the listener will bind to
	Port int `mapstructure:"port"`

	// The number of sockets that the listener will use
	Sockets int `mapstructure:"sockets"`

	// The number of workers that the listener will use to decode incoming flow messages
	// By default it will be two times the number of sockets
	// Ideally set this to the number of CPU cores
	Workers int `mapstructure:"workers"`

	// The size of the queue that the listener will use
	// This is a buffer that will hold flow messages before they are processed by a worker
	QueueSize int `mapstructure:"queue_size"`
}

Config represents the receiver config settings within the collector's config.yaml

func (*Config) Validate

func (cfg *Config) Validate() error

Validate checks if the receiver configuration is valid

type Listener

type Listener struct {
}