Tools for managing network traffic flows: A comparative analysis

Over the years the number of elements in a corporate network, the services and the amount of traffic have grown significantly. For this reason, it is increasingly important to analyze the traffic. Packet-based analysis is the traditional option but entails a high resources consumption. In order to palliate this, flow-based analysis arises. It usually implies to deploy a flow exporter, responsible of generating the flows from the network packets, and a flow collector, in charge of receiving, storing and preprocessing the exported flows. This paper provides a study on flow exporters and collectors. To the best of our knowledge, there is little work dealing with the resources consumed by this kind of tools. Specifically, available memory, CPU load and volume of traffic have been monitored. Using a well-known dataset, packets have been sent to exporters and collectors in order to observe how they behave.