Thanks for that, I did not realize that IPFIX had been extended beyond its netflow past.
I don't have the time now, but I am interested in looking into it further. It does kind of remind me of ASN.1/SNMP, where we need to worry about the names/OID translation Also, a lot of vendors and users seem to prefer the ease of text-based protocols like Syslog for logging. I am not saying this is good or bad, but it seems to be the sweetspot -- binary is not natively human readable and XML has too much overhead. William Heinbockel The MITRE Corporation >-----Original Message----- >From: Jeroen Massar [mailto:[email protected]] >Sent: Wednesday, 16 February 2011 05:35 >To: Heinbockel, Bill >Cc: [email protected]; Chris Lonvick; Gene Golovinsky; Sam Johnston; Common >Event Expression >Subject: Re: [Syslog] draft-cloud-log-00 / CEE - why not IPFIX? > >On 2011-02-16 06:21, Heinbockel, Bill wrote: >> From what I understand, IPFIX is for expression of IP flows from network >sensing >> devices. > >For a short bit forget about the history of IPFIX, it indeed comes from >NetFlow, and thus is used quite in a network centric way, but >effectively it is a structured streaming data format. > >> Could you please explain how IPFIX is relevant to event and cloud logging >data? >> I understand how CEE and IPFIX may overlap for describing networking >events, but >> it is unclear to me how IPFIX could handle things like Windows Event Logs >and >> RHEL audit logs. > >There are two parts to IPFIX: Templates + Data > >The template describes how the data looks like, for instance, lets take >an Apache CLF log entry: > >66.249.66.174 - - [16/Feb/2011:10:48:11 +0100] "GET /robots.txt >HTTP/1.1" 200 2629 "-" "Googlebot-Image/0" > >We can make an IPFIX template for that > >[ > {4, IPv4_SRC }, > {4, TIMESTAMP}, > {4, HTTP_METHOD}, > {v, URL}, > {v, HTTP_PROTOCOL}, > {2, HTTP_RESULT}, > {8, OCTETS}, > {v, HTTP_REFER}, > {v, HTTP_USERAGENT}, >] > >The 'v' markers indicate variable fieldlengths, the others indicates the >number of bytes such a field takes. The data is then just encoded in the >above format, presto. > >The above is a simple example, one can also have repeating lists and of >course you could make a variable template which just includes the fields >that you actually want to look at or you could already do some >aggregation and add other fields. Templates are only sent every now and >then, as they should not change. The data is the important bit. > >The fieldnames are actually numbers in the data, thus very compact, and >are mapped to descriptions, data types etc, per a nice XML file > http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipfix/ipfix.xml (or .xhtml or .txt for >a more human readable version ;) for the official IANA list and with the >help of Enterprise IDs any others can easily be added. > >The big advantage is that you can more or less do static templates if >you want and you only need one single parser on the collector side, thus >one does not have to create another parser and collector again for >decoding other protocols, just one, the IPFIX one, and you can optimize >that really well for all kinds of scenarios. > >Greets, > Jeroen
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