Flow Exporters
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A flow exporter is any network device or software that generates and sends flow data to a collector. It's essentially the source of flow information in network monitoring.

Key exporters caracteristics include:

- Flow Creation: Examines packets and groups them into flows based on 5-tuple (source IP, destination IP, source port, destination port, protocol)
- Statistics Aggregation: Counts bytes, packets, tracks TCP flags, timestamps
- Protocol Support: Exports in a specific flow format (NetFlow v5/v9, IPFIX, sFlow)
- Configurable Export: Destination IP/port, sampling rate, template refresh rates

.. figure:: ../img/exporters.png

In the above figure

- All exporters send to nProbe, not directly to ntopng
-	    nProbe becomes the single exporter from ntopng's perspective
-	    ntopng sees flows coming from nProbe's IP (e.g., 127.0.0.1)

	    
Management happens at nProbe level:

-    Configure exporters to send to nProbe's IP:port
-    nProbe handles protocol translation, load balancing
-    Exporters are "hidden" from ntopng


Exporters in ntopng
-------------------

Flow exporters are accessed from the menu on the left sidebar:

.. figure:: ../img/ntopng_exporters.png
	    :width: 50%
   
Exporters are listed under the nProbe instance that collects flows from. You can read statistics abotu collected flows, drops and active license.

Sites
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On large networks you can define sites on which exporters are active so you can cluster them based on their location.

.. figure:: ../img/sites.png
	    
Sites can be configured from the above menu and you set its location under the configuration menu entry.

.. figure:: ../img/exporters_stats.png
	    :width: 50%
	
Exporter sites are reported in various ntopng pages such as the live flow page or the dashboard. If you have enabled historical flows you can search for flows according to a site.