The sFlow Probe must be installed and configured before it can start monitoring network
traffic.
The following steps are needed to properly set up an sFlow Probe:
- Configure the probe.
- Connect the eth0 interface to a 10/100 port to the network (select a
location that allows it communicate with the switches/routers it is to
monitor. The sFlow Probe must be able to talk to the switches/routers via
SNMP).
- Connect the eth1..ethN interfaces to the SPAN/Mirror ports to be monitored
Note: For optimum performance these should be Tigon-based
NIC cards.
- Configure the switch mirror/SPAN ports to send traffic to the probe.
WARNING You can either mirror traffic in both
direction from a single port, or mirror inbound traffic on multiple ports.
Any other configuration will result in inaccurate results (see Port
Mirroring).
- Configure NetFlow sources to send NetFlow packets to the sFlow probe
(using the port that was configured in the pkp.ini file created in step 1).
- Check the sFlow Probe has SNMP read access to the switch/router by:
snmpwalk <switch/router IP> <community>.
- Verify that the sFlow Probe is operating correctly by checking the performance
counters.
At this point your sFlow Analyzer should be receiving the sFlow packets.