Vector Packet Processor (VPP) release 25.10 extends the
sFlow implementation to include support for
dropped packet notifications, providing detailed, low overhead, visibility into traffic flowing through a VPP router, see
Vector Packet Processor (VPP) for performance information.
sflow sampling-rate 10000
sflow polling-interval 20
sflow header-bytes 128
sflow direction both
sflow drop-monitoring enable
sflow enable GigabitEthernet0/8/0
sflow enable GigabitEthernet0/9/0
sflow enable GigabitEthernet0/a/0
The above VPP configuration commands enable sFlow monitoring of the VPP dataplane, randomly sampling packets, periodically polling counters, and capturing dropped packets and reason codes. The measurements are send via Linux netlink messages to an instance of the open source
Host sFlow agent (hsflowd) which combines the measurements and streams standard
sFlow telemetry to a remote collector.
sflow {
collector { ip=192.0.2.1 udpport=6343 }
psample { group=1 egress=on }
dropmon { start=on limit=50 }
vpp { }
}The
/etc/hsflowd.conf file above enables the modules needed to receive netlink messages from VPP and send the resulting sFlow telemetry to a collector at 192.0.2.1. See
vpp-sflow for detailed instructions.
docker run -p 6343:6343/udp sflow/sflowtool
Run
sflowtool on the sFlow collector host to verify verify that the data is being received and to see the information available in the sFlow telemetry stream. The pre-built
sflow/sflowtool Docker image is the fastest way to run sflowtool.
Docker also makes it easy to try out other sFlow analytics tools, for example,
Deploy real-time network dashboards using Docker compose, describes how to quickly set up measurement stack consisting of the
sFlow-RT real-time analytics engine,
Prometheus time series database, and
Grafana dashboard builder.
The sFlow VPP module delivers the same industry standard network performance monitoring available in switches and routers from leading vendors, including Arista, Cisco, Dell, Juniper, NVIDIA, VyOS, etc. to provide comprehensive, network-wide, visibility.
