A flow monitor is essentially a NetFlow cache. The Flow Monitor has two major components the Flow Record and the Flow Exporter. The flow monitor can track both ingress and egress information. The flow record contains what information being tracked by NetFlow (i.e. IP address, ports, protocol...). The Flow exporter describes the NetFlow export. Flow monitors may be used to track IPv4 traffic, IPv6 traffic, multicast or unicast, MPLS, bridged traffic. Multiple Flow monitors can be created and attached to a specific physical or logical interface. Flow monitors can also include packet sampling information if sampling is required.