pFlours: A New Packet and Flow Gathering Tool

A network monitoring is an essential activity for managing, diagnosing, and protecting network resources. The network traffic gathering is a foundation of the network monitoring. For the detail network monitoring, both the packet information and the flow information is needed. However, in the sampling needed environments, the sampling method and timing of the packet and flow gathering tools are different. Here, the synchronization problem occurs. Thus, in this paper, we present a new network traffic gathering tool called pFlours. The proposed tool, pFlours, fetches a packet and does the sampling, and then makes flows and packet dumps using the fetched packet. This, the ensemble of packet and flow information eliminates a synchronization problem during sampling network traffic. In this paper, we present the specification of pFlours: the aims, features, design, and performance. The pFlours can gather flows as well as packets, solve the synchronization problem, and export the gathered packets and flows to the remote collector. Furthermore, the pFlours consumes only little system resource and shows good work on the high speed networks.