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I have been given a project to create a web application which presents traffic information to clients. It is to be used with Cisco equipment which has Netflow installed. I have a lot of experience with web development, so no problems there (yet!), but I do need a push in the right direction as to how to retrieve the information from Netflow. My application will be different from Netflow Traffic Analyser since it will display only the traffic related to the host that is viewing the page.

Thanks.

Neurion
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Step one is going to be to learn what NetFlow is -- in particular, NetFlow itself is a push technology ("NetFlow" is the name of the protocol over which information is sent; a UDP stream directed at a collector) rather than a pull technology.

It doesn't really make sense, then, to say that NetFlow is "installed"; typically one says that a Cisco device is "configured to send NetFlow". Perhaps they mean that a particular NetFlow collector is installed? NetFlow Traffic Analyser is a collector: it has a component that receives, parses, and stores NetFlow data for later retrieval. Showing only data from only one IP is a more difficult task, not a less difficult task, because it requires having all the data for any IP address that might legitimately ask, and being able to retrieve and format it on-demand.

So, my push in the right direction is that you need to find out: do you need to write a collector, or are you writing an interface to an existing collector?

Writing a collector is not easy, by the way, and is not typically a task for a web developer. If that turns out to be what you've been asked to do, I would highly recommend using an existing one rather than writing your own, because there are a number of pitfalls. There are a number of existing NetFlow collectors that have APIs and command line tools that can be used as the basis for an application like you describe.

John Murphy
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