Master branch
Devel branch

Flow Data Storage library

The library provides components for parsing and processing IPFIX Messages.

Available components:

• IPFIX Data structure parsers
• IPFIX Data Record iterators (with Biflow support)
• IPFIX Template manager
• IPFIX Data type coverters (e.g. getters, setters, and to string)
• Manager of Information Elements (i.e. id, name, type, etc. of IPFIX fields)
• Simple XML parser with data type check (implemented as a wrapper over libxml2)
• Flow file storage (beta)

The library doesn't contain support for receiving IPFIX over network and processing IPFIX Messages. However, all these features are provided by IPFIXcol2 (high-performance collector), which is built on this library and is easily extensible by plugins. Therefore, if you want to, for example, process or convert flow records for your application, it's recommended to use any of available plugins or write a new output plugin for the collector.

How to build

First of all, install build dependencies of the library

RHEL/CentOS:

yum install gcc gcc-c++ cmake make libxml2-devel lz4-devel libzstd-devel
# Optionally: doxygen

• Note: latest systems (e.g. Fedora) use dnf instead of yum.
• Note: if ZSTD library (libzstd-devel) is not available, you can try to add official EPEL repository (yum -y install epel-release) and install it again. Alternatively, it's also possible to use embedded version of the library by passing additional option -DUSE_SYSTEM_ZSTD=off to cmake .. while building.
• Note: if LZ4 library (lz4-devel) is not available for your distribution or you prefer to use libfds embedded version, you can pass additional option -DUSE_SYSTEM_LZ4=off to cmake ..

Debian/Ubuntu:

apt-get install gcc g++ cmake make libxml2-dev liblz4-dev libzstd-dev
# Optionally: doxygen pkg-config

• Note: if ZSTD library (libzstd-dev) or LZ4 library (liblz4-dev), is not available for your distribution or you prefer to use embedded versions of these libraries, you can pass additional option -DUSE_SYSTEM_LZ4=off, resp. -DUSE_SYSTEM_ZSTD=off to cmake .. while building.

Finally, build and install the library:

$ git clone https://github.com/CESNET/libfds.git
$ cd libfds
$ mkdir build && cd build
$ cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr
$ make
# make install