Is there an open source netflow collector C++ library set?

Question

I am looking for a C++ library set to develop my own C++ daemon in Linux for collecting NetFlow information. Does anyone know of an open source one or a library set that is available?

Many thanks

Answer 1

Have you tried Googling? There are plenty of daemons for NetFlow available, for Linux and BSD flavors:

• http://www.mindrot.org/projects/softflowd/

• http://fprobe.sourceforge.net/

• http://lionet.info/ipcad/

Answer 2

FWIW - take a look also at http://code.google.com/p/flowd/ - it's small and BSD-licensed, so you should be able to tweak it according to your needs. (I'm not affiliated with it at all, just used a few times, and liked the tiny footprint).

Answer 3

For a stand-alone library, you can try "libipfix". It implements the newer IETF IPFIX protocol, but also understands Netflow v9 (on which IPFIX is based). But I don't think it can process older Netflow versions (v1 and v5 are common), so this is probably only useful if your Netflow-exporting devices support Netflow v9.