sFlow - Making the Network Visible

About sFlow

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Overview Documents

Packet Sampling Theory

History of Packet Sampling

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Packet Sampling Theory

A key aspect of sFlow is that it provides quantitative measurements. sFlow has been specifically designed as part of a complete traffic monitoring solution. The overall system takes advantages of the statistical properties of packet sampling and can be modeled using statistical sampling theory. This means that the sFlow traffic monitoring system will always produce statistically quantifiable measurements.

The following documents describe the statistical models supporting sFlow and other experiences with using sampling to measure network traffic.