flowpipeline

Flow Pipeline

godoc

About The Project

bwNET is a research project of the German federal state of Baden-Württemberg which aims to provide innovative services within the state's research and education network BelWü. This GitHub Org contains the code pertaining to the monitoring aspect of this project.

This repo contains our flow processing toolkit which enables us and our users to define pipelines for goflow2-compatible flow messages. The flowpipeline project integrates most other parts of our flow processing stack into a single piece of software which can be configured to serve any function:

• accepting raw Netflow (using goflow2)
• enriching the resulting flow messages (examples/enricher)
• writing to and reading from Kafka (examples/localkafka)
• dumping flows to cli (e.g. flowdump)
• providing metrics and insights (examples/prometheus)
• and many more...

Getting Started

To get going, choose one of the following deployment methods.

Compile from Source

Clone this repo and use go build . to build the binary yourself.

By default, the binary will look for a config.yml in its local directory, so you'll either want to create one or call it from any example directory (and maybe follow the instructions there).

Binary Releases

Download our latest release and run it, same as if you compiled it yourself.

The default, dynamically linked version requires a reasonably recent system (glibc 2.32+, linux 5.11+ for bpf, ...) and comes with all features. As a fallback option, the static binaries will work in older environments (CentOS 7, Debian 10, ...), but come without the segments that require CGO/dynamically linked code (bpf, sqlite, and plugin support, check CONFIGURATION.md).

Container Releases

A ready to use container is provided as bwnetflow/flowpipeline, you can check it out on GitHub container registry.

Configurations referencing other files (geolocation databases for instance) will work in a container without extra edits. This is because the volume mountpoint /config is prepended in all segments which accept configuration to open files, if the binary was built with the container build flag.

podman run -v ./examples/xy:/config flowpipeline
# or
docker run -v ./examples/xy:/config flowpipeline

Configuration

Refer to CONFIGURATION.md for the full guide. Other than that, looking at the examples should give you a good idea what the config looks like in detail and what the possible applications are. For sake of completeness, here's another minimal example which starts listening for Netflow v9 on port 2055, applies the filter given as first argument, and then prints it out in a tcpdump-style format.

- segment: goflow
- segment: flowfilter
  config:
    filter: $0
- segment: printflowdump

You'd call it with ./flowpipeline "proto tcp and (port 80 or port 443)"., for instance.

Custom Segments

If you find that the existing segments lack some functionality or you require some very specific behaviour, it is possible to include segments as a plugin. This is done using the -p yourplugin.so commandline option and your own custom module. See examples/plugin for a basic example and instructions on how to compile your plugin.

Note that this requires CGO and thus will not work using the static binary releases or in a container.

Contributing

Contributions in any form (code, issues, feature requests) are very much welcome.