Traffic flow (NetFlow) metrics

Analyse device traffic metadata with NetFlow records.

Traffic flow metrics describe device communication after a network session has been established.

Question answered: Where did the device send traffic, and how much?

What the records show

• Source and destination IP addresses.
• Ports and protocols.
• Traffic volumes and packet counts.
• High-level application classification, where available.

Privacy boundary: Traffic flow data contains metadata only. It does not include packet payloads.

Metadata only

NetFlow records contain metadata about traffic. They do not contain packet payloads, and the service does not perform deep application-layer inspection. You can see that a device sent a given volume of traffic to a given endpoint over a given protocol. You cannot see the contents of that traffic, by design. Scope and boundaries covers this in full.

Common uses

• Understanding traffic destinations: Seeing the actual endpoints a fleet talks to often surfaces services nobody remembered were still in the picture.
• Identifying unexpected or unauthorised endpoints: Traffic to an endpoint outside your approved list is visible without needing anything installed on the device.
• Traffic volume and behaviour analysis: Volumes and packet counts per flow show how consumption is distributed across destinations, which is usually more useful than a single per-SIM total.
• Security posture validation: The practical version of the question is simple: are these devices only talking to the services they are supposed to talk to? NetFlow data answers it directly, which is why this dataset commonly feeds SIEM and SOC environment