Introduction

The IPFIX protocol has been developed for the purpose of exporting IP packet flow information from IP devices such as routers or measurement stations to mediation, accounting, and network management systems. This export includes (a) attributes derived from the IP packet headers and (b) attributes known only to the exporter (e.g., ingress and egress ports, network prefix). The IPFIX protocol defines the data mapping, a way to specify templates for data record definition and a transport mapping to export flow information records across the network from an IPFIX exporter to an IPFIX collector. It is intended for the purposes of Internet research, measurement, attack and intrusion detection, accounting, and billing.

libipfix

The libipfix is used to export and collect measurement data. Libipfix is a C-library implementing the IPFIX protocol defined by the IP Flow Information Export working group of the IETF. In the "examples" subdirectory there are some small example programs containing code that demonstrates how to use the library.

Documentation

• Howto libIPFIX (draft)
• libIPFIX ChangeLog
• Overview Slides (draft)

Download

• The libipfix public download can be found here
• jipfix Java wrapper (requires libipfix) http://relet.net/trac/jipfix

IPFIX links

• IPFIX charter
• Mailing-List Archive

• RFC 3917 - Requirements for IP Flow Information Export
• RFC 3955 - Evaluation of Candidate Protocols for IP Flow Information Export (IPFIX)

• draft-ietf-ipfix-architecture-12.txt - Architecture for IP Flow Information Export
• RFC 5102 - Information Model for IP Flow Information Export
• RFC 5101 - IPFIX Protocol Specification
• draft-ietf-ipfix-as-12.txt - IPFIX Applicability
• draft-dressler-ipfix-aggregation-05.txt - IPFIX Aggregation
• draft-ietf-ipfix-reducing-redundancy-04.txt - Reducing Redundancy in IP Flow Information Export (IPFIX) and Packet Sampling (PSAMP) Reports