Using Minions as a flow collector

Beyond a basic flows setup, you may want to add a Minion to collect flows data from hard-to-reach or remote locations.

To do so, you configure a listener on a Minion for specific protocols.

flow integration minion
Figure 1. Flow integration with Minion

Before you begin

Make sure you do the following:

Configure a listener on a Minion

This example enables a generic listener for the NetFlow v5 protocol on Minion.

NetFlow v5 uses the generic UDP listener, but other protocols require a specific listener. See the examples in $OPENNMS_HOME/etc/telemetryd-configuration.xml, or Telemetryd Listener Reference for details.

To enable and configure a listener for NetFlow v5 on Minion, connect to the Karaf Console and set the following properties:

config:edit --alias udp-8877 --factory org.opennms.features.telemetry.listeners
config:property-set name Netflow-5
config:property-set class-name org.opennms.netmgt.telemetry.listeners.UdpListener
config:property-set parameters.port 8877
config:property-set parsers.0.name Netflow-5-Parser
config:property-set parsers.0.class-name org.opennms.netmgt.telemetry.protocols.netflow.parser.Netflow5UdpParser
config:update
If using a configuration management, you can create and use the properties file as startup configuration in $MINION_HOME/etc/org.opennms.features.telemetry.listeners-udp-8877.cfg. 
name = Netflow-5
class-name = org.opennms.netmgt.telemetry.listeners.UdpListener
parameters.port = 8877
parsers.0.name Netflow-5-Parser
parsers.0.class-name org.opennms.netmgt.telemetry.protocols.netflow.parser.Netflow5UdpParser
You must also enable the associated protocol, in this case Netflow-5, on Horizon to process the messages.

In some scenarios, the exporter’s address is altered due to network address translation. In this case, use node metadata to identify the exporter. Use the metaDataNodeLookup parameter to specify a context-key pair in the form of context:key for the lookup.

The value the lookup uses corresponds to the following fields from each protocol:

Property Description

NetFlow v5

engineId

NetFlow v9

sourceId

IPFix

observationDomainId

SFlow

agent_address:sub_agent_id

BMP

bgpId