/sflowtool

Print binary sFlow feed to ASCII, or forward it to other collectors.

Primary LanguageCOtherNOASSERTION

sflowtool

Print binary sFlow feed to ASCII, or forward it to other collectors.

This tool receives sFlow data, and generates either a simple-to-parse tagged-ASCII output, or binary output in tcpdump(1) format. It can also generate Cisco NetFlow version 5 datagrams and send them to a destination UDP host:port, or forward the original sFlow feed to a number of additional collectors.

Please read the licence terms in ./COPYING.

For more details on the sFlow data format, see http://www.sflow.org.

Build from sources

./boot.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install

(Start from ./configure if you downloaded a released version.)

Usage examples

If sFlow is arriving on port 6343, you can pretty-print the data like this:

% ./sflowtool -p 6343

or get a line-by-line output like this:

% ./sflowtool -p 6434 -l

In a typical application, this output would be parsed by an awk or perl script, perhaps to extract MAC->IP address-mappings or to extract a particular counter for trending. The usage might then look more like this:

% ./sflowtool -p 6343 | my_perl_script.pl > output

Alternatively, you can show packet decodes like this:

% ./sflowtool -p 6343 -t | tcpdump -r -

To forward Cisco NetFlow v5 records to UDP port 9991 on host collector.mysite.com, the options would be:

% ./sflowtool -p 6343 -c collector.mysite.com -d 9991

If you compiled with -DSPOOFSOURCE, then you have the option of "spoofing" the IP source address of the netflow packets to match the IP address(es) of the original sflow agent(s)...

% ./sflowtool -p 6343 -c collector.mysite.com -d 9991 -S

To replicate the input sflow stream to several collectors, use the "-f host/port" option like this:

% ./sflowtool -p 6343 -f localhost/7777 -f localhost/7778 -f collector.mysite.com/6343

Example Output

An example of the pretty-printed output is shown below. Note that every field can be parsed as two space-separated tokens (tag and value). Newlines separate one field from the next. The first field in a datagram is always the "unixSecondsUTC" field, and the first field in a flow or counters sample is always the "sampleSequenceNo" field. In this example, the datagram held two flow-samples and two counters-samples. Comments have been added in <<>> brackets. These are not found in the output.

 unixSecondsUTC 991362247      <<this is always the first field of a new datagram>>
 datagramVersion 2
 agent 10.0.0.254              <<the sFlow agent>>
 sysUpTime 10391000
 packetSequenceNo 5219         <<the sequence number for datagrams from this agent>>
 samplesInPacket 4
 sampleSequenceNo 9466         <<the sequence number for the first sample - a flow sample from 0:0>>
 sourceId 0:0
 sampleType FLOWSAMPLE
 meanSkipCount 10
 samplePool 94660
 dropEvents 0
 inputPort 14
 outputPort 16
 packetDataTag INMPACKETTYPE_HEADER
 headerProtocol 1
 sampledPacketSize 1014
 headerLen 128
 headerBytes 00-50-04-29-1B-D9-00-D0-B7-23-B7-D8-08-00-45-00-03-E8-37-44-40-00-40-06-EB-C6-0A-00-00-01-0A-00-00-05-0D-F1-17-70-A2-4C-D2-AF-B1-F0-BF-01-80-18-7C-70-82-E0-00-00-01-01-08-0A-23-BC-42-93-01-A9-
 dstMAC 005004291bd9               <<a rudimentary decode, which assumes an ethernet packet format>>
 srcMAC 00d0b723b7d8
 srcIP 10.0.0.1
 dstIP 10.0.0.5
 IPProtocol 6
 TCPSrcPort 3569
 TCPDstPort 6000
 TCPFlags 24
 extendedType ROUTER               <<we have some layer3 forwarding information here too>>
 nextHop 129.250.28.33
 srcSubnetMask 24
 dstSubnetMask 24
 sampleSequenceNo 346              <<the next sample is a counters sample from 0:92>>
 sourceId 0:92
 sampleType COUNTERSSAMPLE
 statsSamplingInterval 20
 counterBlockVersion 1
 ifIndex 92
 networkType 53
 ifSpeed 0
 ifDirection 0
 ifStatus 0
 ifInOctets 18176791
 ifInUcastPkts 92270
 ifInMulticastPkts 0
 ifInBroadcastPkts 100
 ifInDiscards 0
 ifInErrors 0
 ifInUnknownProtos 0
 ifOutOctets 40077590
 ifOutUcastPkts 191170
 ifOutMulticastPkts 1684
 ifOutBroadcastPkts 674
 ifOutDiscards 0
 ifOutErrors 0
 ifPromiscuousMode 0
 sampleSequenceNo 9467             <<another flow sample from 0:0>>
 sourceId 0:0
 sampleType FLOWSAMPLE
 meanSkipCount 10
 samplePool 94670
 dropEvents 0
 inputPort 16
 outputPort 14
 packetDataTag INMPACKETTYPE_HEADER
 headerProtocol 1
 sampledPacketSize 66
 headerLen 66
 headerBytes 00-D0-B7-23-B7-D8-00-50-04-29-1B-D9-08-00-45-00-00-34-1E-D7-40-00-40-06-07-E8-0A-00-00-05-0A-00-00-01-17-70-0D-F1-B1-F0-BF-01-A2-4C-E3-A3-80-10-7C-70-E2-62-00-00-01-01-08-0A-01-A9-7F-A0-23-BC-
 dstMAC 00d0b723b7d8
 srcMAC 005004291bd9
 srcIP 10.0.0.5
 dstIP 10.0.0.1
 IPProtocol 6
 TCPSrcPort 6000
 TCPDstPort 3569
 TCPFlags 16
 extendedType ROUTER
 nextHop 129.250.28.33
 srcSubnetMask 24
 dstSubnetMask 24
 sampleSequenceNo 346             <<and another counters sample, this time from 0:93>>
 sourceId 0:93
 sampleType COUNTERSSAMPLE
 statsSamplingInterval 30
 counterBlockVersion 1
 ifIndex 93
 networkType 53
 ifSpeed 0
 ifDirection 0
 ifStatus 0
 ifInOctets 103959
 ifInUcastPkts 448
 ifInMulticastPkts 81
 ifInBroadcastPkts 93
 ifInDiscards 0
 ifInErrors 0
 ifInUnknownProtos 0
 ifOutOctets 196980
 ifOutUcastPkts 460
 ifOutMulticastPkts 599
 ifOutBroadcastPkts 153
 ifOutDiscards 0
 ifOutErrors 0
 ifPromiscuousMode 0

Other ExtendedTypes

If your sFlow agent is running BGP, you may also see GATEWAY extendedType sections like this:

extendedType GATEWAY my_as 65001 src_as 0 src_peer_as 0 dst_as_path_len 3 dst_as_path 65000-2828-4908

The SWITCH, USER and URL extendedTypes may also appear. The SWITCH extendedType provides information on input and output VLANs and priorities. The USER extendedType provides information on the user-id that was allocated this IP address via a remote access session (e.g. RADIUS or TACAS). The URL field indicates for an HTTP flow what the original requested URL was for the flow. For more information, see the published sFlow documentation at http://www.sflow.org.

line-by-line csv output

If you run sflowtool using the "-l" option then only one row of output will be generated for each flow or counter sample. It will look something like this:

[root@server src]# ./sflowtool -l
CNTR,10.0.0.254,17,6,100000000,0,2147483648,175283006,136405187,2578019,297011,0,3,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1
FLOW,10.0.0.254,0,0,00902773db08,001083265e00,0x0800,0,0,10.0.0.1,10.0.0.254,17,0x00,64,35690,161,0x00,143,125,80

The counter samples are indicated with the "CNTR" entry in the first column. The second column is the agent address. The remaining columns are the fields from the generic counters structure (see SFLIf_counters in sflow.h).

The flow samples are indicated with the "FLOW" entry in the first column. The second column is the agent address. The remaining columns are:

inputPort
outputPort
src_MAC
dst_MAC
ethernet_type
in_vlan
out_vlan
src_IP
dst_IP
IP_protocol
ip_tos
ip_ttl
udp_src_port OR tcp_src_port OR icmp_type
udp_dst_port OR tcp_dst_port OR icmp_code
tcp_flags
packet_size
IP_size
sampling_rate

grep-friendly output

Adding the "-g" option causes sflowtool to include contextual information on every line of output. The fields are:

 agentIP
 agentSubId
 datasource_sequenceNo
 datasource_class
 datasource_index
 sampletype_tag
 elementtype_tag

For example, this makes it much easier to extract a particular counter for each agent, accumulate the deltas, and stream it to a time-series database.



Neil McKee (neil.mckee@inmon.com) InMon Corp. http://www.inmon.com