What process removes duplicate flows from multiple QFlow collectors?

Flow Deduplication is the process that specifically addresses the need to remove duplicate flows from multiple QFlow collectors. In environments where multiple collectors are deployed, there can be instances where the same flow data is captured by more than one collector, leading to redundancy and potential inaccuracies in analysis.

The essence of Flow Deduplication is to identify and eliminate these redundant flows, ensuring that the data ingested into the system remains unique and represents a true and accurate depiction of network activity. This is crucial for effective analysis, reporting, and threat detection, as it prevents inflation of flow data metrics and ensures that resources are not wasted on processing duplicate information.

Other processes such as Event Deduplication, while related, primarily focus on deduplicating event data rather than flow data, and may involve different methodologies. Flow Aggregation, on the other hand, is about combining multiple flows into a single representation for easier analysis rather than removing duplicates. Data Cleaning is a broader term that encompasses various data preprocessing activities that ensure data integrity but isn’t specifically tailored to the deduplication of flows from collectors. Thus, Flow Deduplication is the precise term for the process aimed at cleaning up duplicated flow information.