One of my colleagues and I have gotten into a debate about netflow. He's an old Cisco hand and I've recently joined the cisco ops team after working on Juniper for a few years. The debate is whether netflow can be left on all the time or should only be used for temporary diagnostic purposes. I've reviewed the Cisco documentation and it says nothing about if being a short term only monitoring solution (or that leaving it on is in anyway problematic). Any pointers one or the other would be appreciated.
Cisco – Can netflow be left on all the time
cisconetflow
Best Answer
The new Cisco product line does netflow in hardware (and I believe the previous generation as well), but when I approach this question here are the things I typically ask myself:
I have only found benefits when leaving it on all the time, but I also keep an eye on how it's affecting the performance of my network.
To each his own!