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Flowmon
Flowmon Collector
Flowmon Collector is a network monitoring appliance that captures, stores and processes flow data, including normalization, visualization and analysis. The network and application telemetry is displayed on a highly customizable dashboard, turning the network into a transparent environment by providing statistics, visualization and drill-down options for effective troubleshooting and capacity planning.
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Flowmon Collector
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What the Collector can cover in your stack
  • Provides visibility, NPMD, troubleshooting, end user experience monitoring and capacity planning.
  • Supports a multitude of NetFlow/IPFIX formats. Its unmatched flexibility and compatibility allow it to leverage existing routers, switches, firewalls or dedicated Flowmon Probes.
  • Is available as both hardware and a virtual appliance. 
  • Is well-suited for hybrid environments, uniting heterogeneous environments together.
  • Deployable in cloud environments including AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform. 
  • Can serve as a flow proxy for aggregating, formatting and forwarding statistics to big data, security and other analytical platforms.

Customers using the Collector

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Key Features

A Holistic Approach to Network Monitoring

Though red/green server status may be sufficient for availability monitoring, Flowmon's market-leading NPMD solution will give clear insight for user experience monitoring, troubleshooting and capacity planning.

Compatibility

Flowmon Collector can process data in all standard formats such as NetFlow, IPFIX, sFlow, jFlow or NetStream. It supports data exported from any device, allowing for smooth integration into any network.

Hybrid Environment-Ready

Native cloud traffic mirroring combined with the ability to process and normalize heterogeneous data from multiple sources, the Collector provides a uniform level of transparency throughout the public cloud, on-premise or hybrid environments.

Versatility

Flowmon Collector can serve as a tool for network data analysis, allowing the user to see the “big picture”. It can also be used as a proxy to forward the data to security or analytical platforms, or it can serve as a comprehensive and reliable data storage. The Collector simply adapts to the user’s needs.

Scalability

Small businesses or global networks with distributed architecture - Flowmon Collector can serve as a central point of network data storage and analysis with unlimited scalability. Add more Collectors or Flowmon Probes for larger networks and get complete, cost-effective coverage.

Performance

The Collector has the highest performance in flows/s per appliance on the market. Its database system is built for fast data processing and it has enough space to store the resulting amounts of data.

Use Cases Covered by the Collector

Network performance monitoring
Network performance monitoring
Decisive intelligence to identify bottlenecks and resolve latency issues caused by networks, servers and applications.
Troubleshooting and forensics
Troubleshooting and forensics
Next-generation network monitoring provides actionable insights into the network in order to find, analyze and fix issues easily.
Capacity planning
Capacity planning
Comprehensive understanding of bandwidth usage to reduce the risk of services performance degradation and plan network capacity wisely.
Cloud monitoring
Cloud monitoring
Traffic visibility to maintain SaaS apps performance. Flowmon tracks interactions between users and applications and reveals bottlenecks anywhere along the delivery chain.
Encrypted traffic analysis
Encrypted traffic analysis
Scalable malware identification and cryptographic assessment of secured network sessions, which does not rely on decryption.

Compatibility & Network Telemetry

Flowmon Collector is able to process flow data from a variety of different network devices - routers, switches, firewalls, packet brokers or dedicated Flowmon Probes. In this way, it maximizes prior investments into the network infrastructure.

Configuration of flow sources is simple - the Collector performs it automatically. For instance, when a router is configured to export flow data, the Collector recognizes it as a new source, contacts it using SNMP, retrieves information and configures the system accordingly.

Supported Environments

Flowmon Collector is delivered as a cloud application available in AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, as a virtual appliance for use in virtualized environments or as a hardware device with a wide range of configuration choices (flows per second, storage capacity, RAID type).

Apart from data from Flowmon Probes as well as all the other supported formats the Collector supports IPFIX extensions and proprietary formats from other vendors as well:

In-built Modules

In-built Probe

Flowmon Probe is an in-built functionality that analyses packets and extracts the most useful information from L2, L3-L4 and L7 layers even within encapsulated traffic.

It then generates IPFIX records, which are NetFlow enriched with additional data such as network performance metrics, hostnames, URLs, SSL/TLS encryption data and much more. This allows scaling network analytics across the entire IT environment while keeping a granular level of detail for troubleshooting and forensics. 

Extra standalone Probes can be added in large networks for complete coverage.

In-built Analytics - Monitoring Center

Flowmon’s Monitoring Center is the software natively installed on Collector. This powerful tool analyzes the collected data and provides well-arranged results within a smart interface. Learn more about the Monitoring Center.

Distributed Architecture

Flowmon can be easily scaled by adding Collectors as needed to cover very large networks distributed over multiple distant locations. The central node, called Master Unit, will serve as a main console and storage point, and data from all branches will be seamlessly integrated and presented within one dashboard for perfect visibility. All the configuration and updating of the entire architecture, as well as its individual nodes, is performed from the central Collector.

Learn more about distributed architecture

Data Storage

Data can be stored for months or even years, depending on what capacity the user chooses - from 0.5TB to 192TB per appliance. The Collector does not aggregate or sample data – it keeps it all available for as long as specified in disk quotas for auditing or post-compromise purposes. Data can also be exported to network storage and then restored whenever needed.

Unlike full packet capture, flow data does not contain the content of the communication, which results in a significant size reduction of up to 500:1 in the case of NetFlow and 250:1 in IPFIX, consuming a mere 0.2 % and 0.4 % of bandwidth respectively. In this way, a much longer history, reserving full packet analysis only for when it is really needed.

Collector's Resources

Flowmon Collector Product Brief pdf, 275 KB
Flowmon Collector Specification pdf, 252 KB
Transforming Your Network Operations with Enriched Flow Data pdf, 2093 KB