Netflow and OpenObserve Integration

Input and output integration overview

The Netflow plugin is designed to collect traffic flow data from devices using the Netflow v5, v9 and IPFIX protocols. By capturing detailed flow information, this plugin supports network observability and analysis, enabling administrators to monitor traffic patterns and performance metrics effectively.

This configuration pairs Telegraf’s HTTP output with OpenObserve’s native JSON ingestion API, turning any Telegraf agent into a first-class OpenObserve collector.

Integration details

Netflow

The Netflow plugin serves as a collector for flow data using protocols such as Netflow v5, Netflow v9, and IPFIX. This plugin allows users to gather important flow metrics from devices that support these protocols, including a variety of operational insights about traffic patterns, source/destination information, and protocol usage. The plugin leverages templates sent by flow devices to decode incoming data correctly, and it supports private enterprise number mappings for vendor-specific information. With features like adjustable service addresses and buffer sizes, the plugin provides flexibility in how it can be deployed within various network architectures, making it an essential tool for network monitoring and analysis.

OpenObserve

OpenObserve is an open source observability platform written in Rust that stores data cost-effectively on object storage or local disk. It exposes REST endpoints such as /api/{org}/ingest/metrics/_json that accept batched metric documents conforming to a concise JSON schema, making it an attractive drop-in replacement for Loki or Elasticsearch stacks. The Telegraf HTTP output plugin streams metrics to arbitrary HTTP targets; when the "data_format = "json"" serializer is selected, Telegraf batches its metric objects into a payload that matches OpenObserve’s ingestion contract. The plugin supports configurable batch size, custom headers, TLS, and compression, allowing operators to authenticate with Basic or Bearer tokens and to enforce back-pressure without additional collectors. By reusing existing Telegraf agents already collecting system, application, or SNMP data, organizations can funnel rich telemetry into OpenObserve dashboards and SQL-like analytics with minimal overhead, enabling unified observability, long-term retention, and real-time alerting without vendor lock-in.

Configuration

Netflow

[[inputs.netflow]]
  ## Address to listen for netflow,ipfix or sflow packets.
  ##   example: service_address = "udp://:2055"
  ##            service_address = "udp4://:2055"
  ##            service_address = "udp6://:2055"
  service_address = "udp://:2055"

  ## Set the size of the operating system's receive buffer.
  ##   example: read_buffer_size = "64KiB"
  ## Uses the system's default if not set.
  # read_buffer_size = ""

  ## Protocol version to use for decoding.
  ## Available options are
  ##   "ipfix"      -- IPFIX / Netflow v10 protocol (also works for Netflow v9)
  ##   "netflow v5" -- Netflow v5 protocol
  ##   "netflow v9" -- Netflow v9 protocol (also works for IPFIX)
  ##   "sflow v5"   -- sFlow v5 protocol
  # protocol = "ipfix"

  ## Private Enterprise Numbers (PEN) mappings for decoding
  ## This option allows to specify vendor-specific mapping files to use during
  ## decoding.
  # private_enterprise_number_files = []

  ## Log incoming packets for tracing issues
  # log_level = "trace"

OpenObserve

[[outputs.http]]
  ## OpenObserve JSON metrics ingestion endpoint
  url = "https://api.openobserve.ai/api/default/ingest/metrics/_json"

  ## Use POST to push batches
  method = "POST"

  ## Basic auth header (base64 encoded "username:password")
  headers = { Authorization = "Basic dXNlcjpwYXNzd29yZA==" }

  ## Timeout for HTTP requests
  timeout = "10s"

  ## Override Content-Type to match OpenObserve expectation
  content_type = "application/json"

  ## Force Telegraf to batch and serialize metrics as JSON
  data_format = "json"

  ## JSON serializer specific options
  json_timestamp_units = "1ms"

  ## Uncomment to restrict batch size
  # batch_size = 5000

Input and output integration examples

Netflow

1. Traffic Analysis and Visualization: Use the Netflow plugin to collect traffic flow data and visualize it in real-time using an analytics platform. Administrators can create dashboards that display traffic patterns and anomalies, helping them understand bandwidth usage and user behavior.

2. Network Performance Optimization: Integrate the Netflow plugin with performance monitoring tools to identify bottlenecks and optimize the network. Analyze collected metrics to pinpoint areas where network resources can be improved, enhancing overall system performance.

3. Anomaly Detection for Security: Leverage the Netflow data for security analysis by feeding it into an anomaly detection system. This can help identify unusual traffic patterns that may indicate potential security threats, enabling quicker responses to prevent breaches.

4. Customized Alerts for Network Events: Configure threshold-based alerts using the Netflow plugin metrics to notify network administrators of unusual spikes or drops in traffic. This proactive monitoring can help in quickly addressing potential issues before they escalate.

OpenObserve

1. Edge Device Health Mirror: Deploy Telegraf on thousands of industrial IoT devices to capture temperature, vibration, and power metrics, then use this output to push JSON batches to OpenObserve. Plant operators gain a real-time overview of machine health and can trigger maintenance based on anomalies without relying on heavyweight collectors.

2. Blue-Green Deployment Canary: Attach a lightweight Telegraf sidecar to each Kubernetes release-candidate pod that scrapes /metrics and forwards container stats to a dedicated “canary” stream in OpenObserve. Continuous comparison of error rates between blue and green versions empowers the CI pipeline to auto-roll back poor performers within seconds.

3. Multi-Tenant SaaS Billing Pipeline: Emit per-customer usage counters via Telegraf and tag them with tenant_id; the HTTP plugin posts them to OpenObserve where SQL reports aggregate usage into invoices, eliminating separate metering services and simplifying compliance audits.

4. Security Threat Scoring: Fuse Suricata events and host resource metrics in Telegraf, deliver them to OpenObserve’s analytics engine, and run stream-processing rules that correlate spikes in suspicious traffic with CPU saturation to produce an actionable threat score and automatically open tickets in a SOAR platform.

Feedback

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