Net flow data in grafan

[shubhamnyaik]

Hi There,

We are trying to onboard netflow in grafana.
Is there a way by which we can get netflow data in grafana in prometheus format.

We have tried using netflow collector but it has a dependency of influxDB.
We are currently using prometheus backed databases like cortex and mimir.
Please let me know if there is exporter/integration available for getting data in grafana in prometheus format.

There is already an integration/exporter for SNMP. We are looking for similar integration/exporter for netflow.

Regards
Shubham

[tpaschalis]

I'm converting this issue to a Github discussion as it's not directly related to Grafana Agent, let's continue there.

[tpaschalis]

Hey there! The Grafana Agent does not have a built-in Netflow exporter.

As far as I understand, Netflow is a continuous stream of events and cannot be directly mapped to distinct metrics, but need to have some conversion pipeline to generate distinct metrics from them.

This needs a separate pipeline, for example using goflow to serialize and write these netflow event in Kafka, and then have flow-exporter read these Kafka events and emit Prometheus metrics that the Agent can scrape.

You could also take a look at bio-routing/tflow2 which does the same in-memory, but wouldn't know how well it works.

In any case, any PRs or contributions are welcome!