Sampled Flow (sFlow) is a traffic monitoring technology that collects and analyzes traffic statistics.
Enterprise networks differ from carrier networks in that they are smaller, more flexible, and more likely to be attacked. To prevent and limit service interruptions, enterprises require a traffic monitoring technique to locate unexpected traffic as well as the source of an attack in a timely manner.
sFlow provides interface-based traffic analysis, facilitating preventive maintenance on enterprise networks.
Huawei NetStream is also a technology that collects and analyzes traffic statistics. In NetStream, network devices collect and analyze traffic statistics and save statistics to a cache. The statistics are exported when they expire or when the cache overflows. Compared with NetStream, sFlow does not require a cache, network devices only sample packets, and a remote collector collects and analyzes traffic statistics.