A flow in networking terms is a unidirectional set of packets containing common attributes (source and destination IP, ports, protocols, etc). By using a flow protocol (e.g. NetFlow, sFlow, IPFIX), network devices can gather information about these attributes and send assembled information to your collector.

Usually, a big concern is the load on exporters (router, switch, workstation)

Untangle is a company that is renowned among SMBs, education and nonprofit organizations for its software-based applications that consist of NG firewall and SD-WAN router. Lately, Untangle has also developed Command Center, a remote cluster managed GUI. Their main product, NG Firewall, has been on the market since 2003 and it includes some really interesting features and add-ons.

NG

Barracuda is one of the most famous security companies in the world. They have started as a spam-blocking hardware device company, but soon they have diversified their portfolio which is now comprised of numerous products, including renowed CloudGen Firewall. This firewall has two types of GUI - Web and Barracuda Firewall Admin console - with myriad of options for configuration and monitoring.

Fortinet is one of the most used Next Gen Firewalls in the world. It is hard not to be immediately attracted to full integration of end-to-end security across the whole network infrastructure. This is conducted via modules, that are easily enabled. Also GUI is very intuitive, although NetFlow and Syslog configuration do require some additional effort.

Fortinet

CheckPoint is definitely one of the cybersecurity industry leaders, with product portfolio that spans from advance network threat prevention solutions to NGFW. On our favorites list is undoubtedly their new GAiA Operating System, which represents one of the best GUIs on the market as it is amazingly user-friendly.

GAiA NetFlow configuration is pretty