Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Cisco ASA NetFlow configuration

I have been setting up a lot more NetFlow on Cisco ASA's recently. Mainly due to the request for more visibility into the traffic that is consuming Internet bandwidth and for compliance reasons. It seems that even with proxy services and other solutions many IT organizations still have a poor understanding of the actual traffic traversing their network.

Since NetFlow is limited in terms of platform support (specifically the Cisco Catalyst 3k/2k switches do NOT support it) but the Cisco ASA does I have been asked to turn it on the ASA to have a better idea what is going across the network. Cisco has a nice Introduction to Cisco IOS NetFlow if you need to run it on the routing or 4500/6500 platforms which is a great way to go in addition to the ASA as you can then see what is happening between devices on the network also.

Chapter 75 in the Cisco ASA 8.2 CLI Configuration Guide covers how to set up a NetFlow configuration. Here is a short script to get it up and running quickly. A couple of caveats, read the config guide because it covers the parameters for timing and limiting what you are collecting. This script is a "let's get this going, send me everything" sort of solution. Not optimal for heavily loaded ASA's. Should be good enough to get you going though.

!#####
! - NetFlow script for Cisco ASA
!
! - ACL to catch all IP traffic - to specify the traffic you are interested in
access-list flow_export_acl extended permit ip any any
!
! - set up the destination server ip and template rate
flow-export destination {interface name} {IP address} {port #}
flow-export template timeout-rate 1
!
! - build out the class-map for the flow that matches the ACL
class-map flow_export_class
match access-list flow_export_acl
! - or don't use an ACL by using
match any
!
! - build out the policy-map
policy-map flow_export_policy
class flow_export_class
flow-export event-type all destination {IP address}
!
! - apply the policy-map to whatever global policy you have or make one
service-policy flow_export_policy global
!
! - if you have an existing policy-map apply the class-map into that one
! - for instance the default ASA service-policy for global is global_policy
! - so you could add the class-map to it by doing
policy-map global_policy
class flow_export_class
flow-export event-type all destination {IP address}
!
!#####

You can get information about what the ASA is doing in terms of the flow output by using the following commands:
show flow-export counters
show service-policy global flow ip host {source IP} host {dest IP}
show access-list
flow_export_acl

Obviously you need some sort of NetFlow collector. There are a lot of professional and free tools to do this and there are some great vendors doing this. That being said, I have used Plixer's Scrutinizer free product to at least get folks up and working and have a functional tool to look at until they can decide what tool they want to use. It does and excellent job of showing what is possible in terms of reporting and information gathering. That being said the following companies also have NetFlow commercial products you should consider or have free offerings that can be used.
AdventNet
NetQoS - part of CA now
NTOP - opensource tool
SolarWinds

I am leaving off a ton of vendors in the list but I have found if I list everyone who is doing a solution then folks who are trying it out freeze up and can't pick one. I know, not a great reason but I rather have them use something than nothing at all.

Cisco owns the NetFlow name but there is a standards version of NetFlow supported by many other networking vendors called sFlow. Basically it provides the same sort of function but on other vendor equipment. This means that almost all NetFlow collectors can work with sFlow. So if desired you can collect from non Cisco devices that support sFlow to the same collector to get a more complete view from around your network.

If you have not deployed and made use of NetFlow I really recommend doing a quick trial run. You may be surprised by what you find. I've had clients discover employee's watching video and tv shows being pulled from foreign countries (some of questionable content), others consuming high bandwidth across tunneled links they did not know they were running and lots of other interesting items. Many have been surprised how much IPv6 and tunneled IPv6 they are running on their network. It is a great tool so check it out.
- Ed

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hello,

We have been getting a few calls with questions on the uniqueness of the NetFlows exported by the Cisco ASA. Check out this PDF.

Also, please Check out Scrutinizer for NetFlow and sFlow analysis.

Jake