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IPFIXcol2

IPFIXcol2 is a flexible, high-performance NetFlow v5/v9 and IPFIX flow data collector designed to be extensible by plugins. The second generation of the collector includes many design and performance enhancements compared to the original IPFIXcol.

The collector allows you to choose combination of input, intermediate and output plugins that best suit your needs. Do you need to receive data over UDP/TCP and store them for long term preservation? Or, do you prefer conversion to JSON and processing by other systems? No problem, pick any combination of plugins.

Features:

• Input, intermediate and output plugins with various options
• Parallelized design for high-performance
• Support for bidirectional flows (biflow)
• Support for structured data types (i.e. lists)
• Built-in support for many Enterprise-Specific Information Elements (Cisco, Netscaler, etc.)

Available plugins

Input plugins - receive NetFlow/IPFIX data. Each can be configured to listen on a specific network interface and a port. Multiple instances of these plugins can run concurrently.

• UDP - receive NetFlow v5/v9 and IPFIX over UDP
• TCP - receive IPFIX over TCP
• FDS File - read flow data from FDS File (efficient long-term storage)
• IPFIX File - read flow data from IPFIX File

Intermediate plugins - modify, enrich and filter flow records.

• Anonymization - anonymize IP addresses (in flow records) with Crypto-PAn algorithm

Output plugins - store or forward your flows.

• FDS File - store all flows in FDS file format (efficient long-term storage)
• Forwarder - forward flows as IPFIX to one or mode subcollectors
• IPFIX File - store all flows in IPFIX File format
• JSON - convert flow records to JSON and send/store them
• JSON-Kafka - convert flow records to JSON and send them to Apache Kafka
• Viewer - convert IPFIX into plain text and print it on standard output
• Time Check - flow timestamp check
• Dummy - simple output module example
• lnfstore (*) - store all flows in nfdump compatible format for long-term preservation
• UniRec (*) - send flow records in UniRec format via TRAP communication interface (into Nemea modules)

* Must be installed individually due to extra dependencies

How to build

IPFIXcol is based on libfds library that provides functions for IPFIX parsing and manipulation. First of all, install the library. For more information visit the project website and follow installation instructions.

However, you have to typically do following steps: (extra dependencies may be required)

$ git clone https://github.com/CESNET/libfds.git
$ cd libfds
$ mkdir build && cd build && cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr
$ make
# make install

Second, install build dependencies of the collector

RHEL/CentOS:

yum install gcc gcc-c++ cmake make python3-docutils zlib-devel librdkafka-devel
# Optionally: doxygen pkgconfig

• Note: latest systems (e.g. Fedora/CentOS Stream 8) use dnf instead of yum.
• Note: package python3-docutils may by also named as python-docutils or python2-docutils
• Note: package pkgconfig may by also named as pkg-config
• Note: CentOS Stream 8 usually requires additional system repositories to be enabled:

dnf -y install epel-release
dnf config-manager --set-enabled appstream powertools

• Note: Oracle Linux 8 usually requires additional system repositories to be enabled:

dnf -y install oracle-epel-release-el8
dnf config-manager --set-enabled ol8_appstream ol8_codeready_builder

Debian/Ubuntu:

apt-get install gcc g++ cmake make python3-docutils zlib1g-dev librdkafka-dev
# Optionally: doxygen pkg-config

Finally, build and install the collector:

$ git clone https://github.com/CESNET/ipfixcol2.git
$ cd ipfixcol2
$ mkdir build && cd build && cmake ..
$ make
# make install

How to configure and start IPFIXcol

Before you can start IPFIXcol, you have to prepare a configuration file. The file describes how IPFIXcol is configured at startup, which plugins are used and, for example, where flow data will be stored. The structure of the configuration is described here. Several configuration examples that demonstrate features of the collector are given in the section "Example configuration files".

Coming soon

• Runtime reconfiguration (improved compared to the previous generation)
• Input plugins for files (IPFIX, fds, etc.)
• Flow filtration and flow profiling
• Flow aggregation
• RPM/DEB packages

FAQ

Do you have any troubles? Unable to build and run the collector? Feel free to submit a new issue.

We are open to new ideas! For example, are you missing a specific plugin that could be useful also for other users? Please, share your experiences and thoughts.

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Q:	My exporter sends flow data over UDP, however, the IPFIXcol doesn't process/store any data immediately after start.
A:	This is normal behaviour caused by UDP transport protocol. It may take up few minutes until the first record is processed based on template refresh interval on the exporter. For more information, see documentation of UDP plugin.
Q:	The collector is not able to find a plugin. What should I do?
A:	First of all, make sure that the plugin is installed. Some plugins (e.g. Unirec) are optional and must be installed separately. Therefore, list all available plugins using ipfixcol2 -L and check if the plugin is on the list. If not, see the plugin page for help. If the problem still persists, check if the plugin is installed in the correct directory. Since plugins might be placed in different locations on different platforms, show help using ipfixcol2 -h and see the default value of -p PATH parameter. In some situations, it is also possible that the plugin cannot be loaded (even when it is properly installed) due to additional dependencies (e.g. missing library etc.). If this is the issue, use ipfixcol2 -L -v and there might be a message like this WARNING: Configurator (plugin manager): Failed to open file... (some reason) on the first line that might help you.
Q:	How can I add more IPFIX fields into records?
A:	The collector receives flow records captured and prepared by an exporter. IPFIX is an unidirectional protocol which means that the collector is not able to instruct the exporter what to measure or how to behave. If you want to enhance your records, please, check configuration of your exporter.
Q:	After manual build and installation the collector is unable to start and a message similar to error while loading shared libraries: libfds.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory is given.
A:	Make sure that libfds is installed properly and your system is able to locate it. Some systems (e.g. RHEL/CentOS/Fedora) for historical reason doesn't search for shared libraries in the default installation directory where the libfds is installed. You can permanently include this directory. For example, if the library is located in /usr/local/lib64, use as administrator "echo "/usr/local/lib64" > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/local64.conf && ldconfig" or temporarily change an environment variable "export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/local/lib64/"