Flow monitoring tools are useful for tracking traffic patterns, planning capacity, and spotting threats. But many off-the-shelf solutions come with steep licensing costs and hardware demands, especially if you want to process every packet. A research team at the University of Tübingen has built an alternative: an open-source, cost-effective, and distributed platform for collecting unsampled IPFIX data.
Their system, called SENSOR, uses open-source software and vendor-agnostic components to monitor traffic at multiple points in the university’s network. This setup captures internal flows that would otherwise go unnoticed if monitoring were only done at the perimeter.