Just like the PySNMP script in Chapter 7, Network Monitoring with Python – Part 1, and the NetFlow parser script in this chapter, we can use Python scripts to handle low-level tasks on the wire. However, there are tools such as Cacti, which is an all-in-one open source package, that include data collection (poller), data storage (RRD), and a web frontend for visualization. These tools can save you a lot of work by packing the frequently used features and software in one package.
In the case of NetFlow, there are a number of open source and commercial NetFlow collectors you can choose from. If you do a quick search for top N open source NetFlow analyzers, you will see a number of comparison studies for different tools. ...
