Update – November 2017: Added descriptions for the other tools I had investigated.
Update – October 2018: Although it’s not based on Netflow, Al Caughy’s YAMon provides a good view of the traffic flowing through an OpenWrt or DD-WRT router. I use it myself.

Now that LEDE Project has an official release, I hungered for a way to see what kinds of traffic is going through my network. I wanted to answer the question, “who’s hogging the bandwidth?” To do that, I needed a Netflow Collector.

A Netflow Collector is a program that collects flow records from routers to show the kinds and volumes of traffic that passed through the router. The collector adds those flow records into its internal database, and lets you search/display the data. (You also need to configure your router to send (“export”) flow records to the collector. My experiments all employ the softflowd Netflow Exporter. It is a standard package you can install into your LEDE router.)

In an earlier life, I used a slick commercial Netflow monitoring program. But it wasn’t free, so it isn’t something that I can recommend to people for their home networks.

There are many open-source Netflow collectors which have varying degrees of ease of installation/ease of use/features. Most have install scripts that show the steps required to install it on an Ubuntu or CentOS machine, but they are fussy, and require that you have a freestanding computer (or VM) to run it.

Consequently, I created Docker containers that have all the essential packages/modules pre-configured. This means that you can simply install the Docker container, then launch it on a computer that’s continually operating, and let it monitor the data.

This is the first of a series of postings about Netflow Collectors. They include:

• Webview Netflow Reporter Netflow collector and web-based display program. Makes it easy to see fine-grained information about traffic. More…
• NFSEN/NFDUMP Netflow collector and web-based display program. Provides attractive graphs, and automatically detects Netflow exporters (so you can skip one configuration step.) More…
• FlowViewer Another Netflow Collector with web-based GUI. I created a Docker Container for FlowViewer
• FlowBAT A Javascript Netflow collector and display program. This requires an old version of Meteor (0.9.1), and seems not to be currently maintained. The Github repo for FlowBAT has been updated to install using the required (old) version of Meteor.
• DDWarden This claims to work with DD-WRT’s rflow protocol (very similar to Netflow v5). No further investigation because I was interested in something to work with LEDE/OpenWrt.
• Generating Netflow Datagrams A few ways to generate Netflow data: softflowd to run on LEDE/OpenWrt routers and nflow-generator to send mock data in the absence of real traffic.