Vendor-specific Information Elements

NetFlow (v5/v9) allow the collection of pre-defined flow-related metrics. In addition to that IPFIX also supports vendor-specific "Information Elements" beside the pre-defined ones (see https://www.iana.org/assignments/ipfix/ipfix.xhtml#ipfix-information-elements). Horizon supports the collection of vendor-specific IPFIX data.

Adding Vendor-specific Definitions

Any additional definitions need to be placed in the directory ${OPENNMS_HOME}/etc/ipfix.d. The following example shows a definition for a vendor "Foobar-Company" with a Private Enterprise Number (PEN) of "1234". After the starting scope definition the file just lists all defined information elements including their names, their identfiers and their data-types. See https://www.iana.org/assignments/ipfix/ipfix.xhtml#ipfix-information-element-data-types for available data-types.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<ipfix-elements>
    <scope>
        <pen>1234</pen>
        <name>Foobar-Company</name>
    </scope>

    <element>
        <id>123</id>
        <name>myMetricA</name>
        <dataType>unsigned64</dataType>
    </element>
...
    <element>
        <id>456</id>
        <name>myMetricB</name>
        <dataType>unsigned64</dataType>
    </element>
</ipfix-elements>

In order for the newly placed files to become active, Horizon needs to be restarted. When Minions are in use, the parser are executed on the Minions. Thus, the additional definitions also need to placed in the Minions' ipfix.d directories.