Meraki Netflow settings

[AnotherRon]

I have enabled Netflow on Meraki MX appliances, defined the collector address and port number, and the OpManager netflow collector is recording the data. The charts I am getting however have no correlation with what is reported on the historical device data graph on the dashboard for the same time interval. The graphs are so different that it looks like they are from different appliances, where the dashboard records 90%utilisation on the interface, the netflow graph shows about 30%.

Does anyone know why these graphs are so different? I can't believe the fault lies on the collector because they produce good graphs from data received from Cisco routers.

[Alejandro_F]

Hi @AnotherRon,

The main difference is the Netflow data is only the traffic that hits the MX's CPU. If the traffic is hardware switched only, you will not see that in the Netflow collector graphs. As an example if some traffic is send within the same VLAN there is no need to route or NAT it thus is not hitting the MX's CPU and will not show in your Netflow collector.

Here is a link to the document describing  how it works.

https://documentation.meraki.com/MX/Monitoring_and_Reporting/NetFlow_Overview#NetFlow_Export_Scope

I hope that make sense.