NetFlow extension
- Latest Dynatrace
- Extension
- Published Oct 27, 2025
Gain insight into your network traffic by ingesting NetFlow data into Dynatrace.
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Overview
Analyze NetFlow data to identify bottlenecks and enhance application delivery.
The NetFlow extension provides a dashboard to explore and visualize NetFlow data ingested by the NetFlow receiver.
Requirements
An OpenTelemetry Collector is required to ingest the data. The Dynatrace Collector comes with this receiver preinstalled, so you can use it out of the box by configuring the receiver and a batch processor.
Activation and setup
To setup NetFlow ingestion, see Ingest NetFlow packets.
Dynatrace provides a dedicated "NetFlow Overview" dashboard as an entry point to explore and visualize NetFlow data. It includes pre-configured charts and metrics to analyze network traffic, such as top sources, destinations, conversations, and port usage. The dashboard can be found under 
Dashboards > Netflow Overview.
Details
We leverage OpenTelemetry and the NetFlow receiver to ingest the data.
This receiver can process NetFlow v5, v9, sFlow, and IPFIX data formats. The data is then processed by the OpenTelemetry Collector and sent to Dynatrace as log records.
The fields that are parsed from the NetFlow packets are documented in the NetFlow receiver documentation.
Feature sets
When activating your extension using monitoring configuration, you can limit monitoring to one of the feature sets. To work properly the extension has to collect at least one metric after the activation.
In highly segmented networks, feature sets can reflect the segments of your environment. Then, when you create a monitoring configuration, you can select a feature set and a corresponding ActiveGate group that can connect to this particular segment.
All metrics that aren't categorized into any feature set are considered to be the default and are always reported.
A metric inherits the feature set of a subgroup, which in turn inherits the feature set of a group. Also, the feature set defined on the metric level overrides the feature set defined on the subgroup level, which in turn overrides the feature set defined on the group level.
