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Many people are aware that not all the available NetFlow probes are scalable. nProbe has been designed to keep up with Gigabit speeds on commodity hardware. Using a dual core CPU, nProbe can be used for capturing packets at full speed with no/very little (< 1%) packet loss using PF_RING.

You can achieve better results using packet/flow sampling (i.e. the probe does not receive all the packets but just a sample), or using an accelerated packet capture card.

Main nProbe Features:

Available for Linux, Windows, and embedded environments ARM and MIPS/MIPSEL.
Layer-7 application visibility (250+ applications including Skype, BitTorrent and Citrix).
Layer-7 application propagation in exported flows to enable accurate accounting.
NetFlow v5/v9/IPFIX support for efficient flow handling.
Cisco NetFlow-Lite support.
Full IPFIX support: PEN (Private Enterprise Numbers) and Variable length encoding.
Complete support for IPv4 and IPv6.
Limited memory footprint (less that 2 MB of memory regardless of the network size) and CPU savvy.
Ability to natively export flows to Apache™ , Syslog, MySQL/MariaDB, Splunk (via TCP streaming).
Ability to natively export flows to Kafka and ElasticSearch (using the Export Plugin).
Ability to dump flows in format ready for import in columnar databases.
Native support for technologies PF_RING and the newest kernel-bypass PF_RING Zero Copy (ZC) for ultra-high speed packet capture.
Ability to act as flow collector and proxy. All combinations are supported.
Ability to collect sFlow flows and transparently translate them into NetFlow v5/v9/IPFIX.
Ability to forge NetFlow interface identificators based on MAC/IP addresses.
Collection of Cisco ASA flows and conversion into NetFlow v5/v9/IPFIX.
Multi-threaded architecture for the exploitation of multi-processor, multi-core elaboration systems.
Support of tunneled (including GRE, PPP and GTP) traffic and ability to export inner/outer envelope/packet information.
Support of both flow and packet sampling.
Support of Flexible Netflow for the creation of custom NetFlow templates, with optional PEN support.
VoIP (SIP and RTP) traffic analysis including voice quality and (pseudo-)MOS.
HTTP, MySQL/Oracle, DNS protocol analysis: ability to generate logs of web, MySQL/Oracle and DNS activities in addition to flow export.
BGP Plugin for establishing a BGP session with a router and generate flows with AS and AS path information.
Plugin architecture for easy extensibility via custom V9/IPFIX tags.
Fully interoperable with commercial collectors such as IsarFlow, Fluke, Cisco, Dartware, Arbor Networks, Plixer, NetFlow Auditor, SolarWinds Orion NTA, Andrisoft.
Designed for running on environments with limited resources (the nProbe™ binary < 100 Kb) and embedded systems (e.g. ARM- and MIPSEL-based appliances).
It can be used to build cheap NetFlow probes using commodity hardware.
Ability to save flows on disk for later analysis or integration into an existing monitoring application.
Fully user-configurable.
High-performance probe: commercial probes included those embedded on routers and switches are often not able to keep up with high-speeds.
Can be used in conjunction with ntopng to visualize and analyze monitored traffic.