What does that mean for my network right now?
When a router samples a packet, it creates a tiny record (usually 64–128 bytes of the packet header—source IP, destination IP, port, protocol). It wraps this in an sFlow datagram (UDP) and fires it out to a collector. sflow analyzer
In a cloud-native environment, sFlow agents run on virtual switches (Open vSwitch). The analyzer cross-references sFlow samples with orchestrator APIs. It can show: "Pod frontend-7d8f9 is talking to database postgres-0 using 200 Mbps of TLS traffic—this is anomalous." What does that mean for my network right now
The analyzer sees: "1 packet for 192.168.1.100 -> 203.0.113.50, sample rate 1/1000". It immediately multiplies: This represents 1,000 real packets . It then multiplies by average packet size (from the header, say 500 bytes) to get 500,000 bytes (4 Mbits) of traffic contributed by that flow. In a cloud-native environment, sFlow agents run on