cflowd

Cflowd is a flow analysis tool that focuses on the analysis of Cisco's NetFlow enabled switching method. With the current release, users get access to collections, storage, and basic analysis modules for cflowd and the arts++ libraries. This analysis package is meant to facilitate data collection and analysis for ISPs and network engineers for tasks such as capacity planning, trends analysis, and workload characterization in a network service provider environment.

Aside from these tasks, users can find cflowd useful in other areas such as web hosting tracking, accounting and billing, network planning and analysis, network monitoring, developing user profiles, data warehousing and mining, as well as security-related investigations. However, it is important to note that cflowd is no longer supported by CAIDA. Users are encouraged to turn to flow-tools as an alternative.

Flow-tools provide a toolset for working with NetFlow data that can be used in conjunction with FlowScan, which is maintained by Dave Plonka at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. To use cflowd, users must download and install the arts++ package. The library contains header files and libraries necessary for cflowd, and the C++ library for handling the data stored by cfdcollect. It also includes utilities for aggregating and viewing data.

In the latest release, cflowdmux has been improved with fixes for race conditions for packet queue buffers. To avoid deadlock, read clients must be well-behaved when using cflowd. Overall, cflowd is a powerful tool with robust capabilities for network data analysis that can prove useful in various network engineering and ISP scenarios.