For years, regular monitoring of a network was performed by the SNMP protocol that delivers an overview of the IT infrastructure; giving network administrators information about the availability of its components.
Today, when the availability and proper working of a company's network are crucial for its existence, much more information and sophisticated methods are needed. To get this information, organisations widely adopt NetFlow and IPFIX. Routers, switches and specialised network probes that export this type of data also register increasing demand.
Network traffic monitoring generates statistics both on the underlying data transfers when abstracting from packets, and the subject of the communication itself (the content of the communication is not stored). These statistics represent the flow data in the network, which can be thought of as similar to a list of telephone calls. Network and Security Operations gain an understanding of who communicates with whom, when, how long and how often. In the language of a data network environment, they monitor IP addresses, data volumes, time, ports, protocols and this can further be enriched with latency measurements and application layer data for a variety of protocols.