The Flow Monitoring service consists of aggregators and exporters that accept flows and pass flows to other connected modules. Aggregator and exporter modules may be configured on an interface. The interface selectors generate defined fixed single-packet flows.

For more information about the fields in these flows, see Exported NetFlow Version 9 and IPFIX IPv4 data.

Aggregator modules can connect with other aggregator and exporter modules by using a next statement. You can configure multiple such connections.

You can define a rule for the aggregator. Each rule is a list of key or nonkey fields. A key field identifies a unique entry in the cache functionality provided by the aggregator module. Nonkey fields are aggregated: for example, if packetDeltaCount is added as a nonkey field, the collected values are aggregated and summed before exporting the values to the flow report. An aggregator must have a rule, and a rule must have at least one key field.

Exporter modules do not pass flows to other modules.

To configure the Flow Monitoring service on example vRouter R1, see Configuring flow monitoring.