Netflow exporter

Have you ever wondered where is your internet traffic going?

How it works

Simply put, it uses netflow protocol, specifically it uses V5 version for simplicity. In order for your setup to work, you will either need nfdump or dedicated hardware such as Mikrotik RB941 Flows are then fed into collector that aggregates them as metrics. Geolocation info is gathered from Maxmind GeoIP Lite database. Necessary files can be obtained on RHEL OS (or similar) with sudo dnf install geolite2-country geolite2-asn

Example configuration for routerboard

/ip traffic-flow
set enabled=yes interfaces=wan,bridge1
/ip traffic-flow target
add dst-address=192.168.0.10 port=30000 version=5

Note 192.168.0.10 is address of machine where exporter is running

Configurable metrics

Flows are aggregated into metrics in fully configurable manner.

Example metric

  - name: traffic_detail
    description: Traffic detail
    labels:
      - name: sampler
        value: sampler
        converter: ipv4
      - name: protocol
        value: proto_name
        converter: str
      - name: source_country
        value: source_country
        converter: str
      - name: destination_asn_org
        value: destination_asn_org
        converter: str

Full example can be found here

Supported enrichers

• maxmind_country

  MaxMind GeoLite country data are used to add source and destination country (if applicable)

  • used attributes: source_ip, destination_ip
  • added attributes: source_country, destination_country
  • configuration options:
  • mmdb_dir - path to directory which holds MaxMind GeoIP DB files

• maxmind_asn

  MaxMind GeoLite country data are used to add source and destination autonomous system (if applicable)

  • used attributes: source_ip, destination_ip
  • added attributes: source_asn_org, destination_asn_org
  • configuration options:
  • mmdb_dir - path to directory which holds MaxMind GeoIP DB files

• interface_mapper

• protocol_name

• reverse_dns

  Does a reverse DNS lookup for IP and selects the first entry returned. unknown set if none found and ip_as_unknown is not enabled. Results (including missing) cached per cache_duration.

  • used attributes: source_ip, destination_ip
  • added attributes: source_dns, destination_dns
  • configuration options:
  • cache_duration - how long to cache result for. Default 1h.
  • tail_pihole - useful if running on a server which is running pihole. If set, read from pihole -t to populate DNS cache. This cache will be used instead of a reverse DNS lookup if available. By tailing the PiHole log, we can see the original query before CNAME redirection and thus give a more interesting answer. Ensure that additional logging entries are enabled, e.g. echo log-queries=extra | sudo tee /etc/dnsmasq.d/42-add-query-ids.conf ; pihole restartdns
  • lookup_local - enable looking up local addresses. Default false.
  • lookup_remote - enable looking up remote addresses. Default true.
  • ip_as_unknown - if a reverse record is not available, uses the IP address itself rather than "unknown" string. Default false.

  e.g. add reverse_dns under enrich: and the following under labels::

  - name: source_ip
  value: source_ip
  converter: ipv4
  - name: destination_ip
  value: destination_ip
  converter: ipv4
  - name: source_dns
  value: source_dns
  converter: str
  - name: destination_dns
  value: destination_dns
  converter: str

  e.g. gather in/out statistics for hosts on the local network:

  pipline:
  ...
  enrich:
    - reverse_dns
  metrics:
    ...
    items:
      - name: traffic_in
        description: Traffic in per host
        labels:
          - name: host
            value: destination_dns
            converter: str
      - name: traffic_out
        description: Traffic out per host
        labels:
          - name: host
            value: source_dns
            converter: str
  
  ...
  extensions:
  reverse_dns:
    lookup_local: true
    lookup_remote: false
    ip_as_unknown: true

Run using podman/docker

podman run -ti -p 30000:30000/udp -p 30001:30001/tcp -u 1000 \
  -v $(pwd)/config.yaml:/config.yaml:ro \
  -v /usr/share/GeoIP:/usr/share/GeoIP:ro \
  ghcr.io/rkosegi/netflow-collector:latest