Aviz Networks ASN details multi-destination Kafka and IPFIX exports
ASN expands its export pipeline to publish the same real-time session and flow data to multiple destinations concurrently, with support for up to six Kafka clusters and up to six IPFIX collectors. The change matters to enterprise IT and security leaders managing parallel analytics, security, fraud, and compliance workloads without disrupting existing exports.
Research Overview
The blog describes an operational need driven by growing deployment complexity, where the same session data must reach several independent consumer platforms at the same time. It frames the solution as an addition to ASN’s export capabilities rather than a replacement for existing export paths.
It also notes that ASN exports large volumes of session records and priority events tied to subscriber analytics and network monitoring. These records include session types for user, control, PFCP, and Diameter activity.
Key Findings
ASN can send session and flow data simultaneously to up to six Kafka clusters and up to six IPFIX collectors, managed through a central configuration. The destinations operate independently so failure or maintenance on one does not interrupt exports to the others.
The blog states that reconfiguration is designed to be zero-downtime, including scenarios such as adding a new cluster, rotating brokers, or changing collector broker addresses without impacting other configured destinations. It also describes that exports only stop when all configured destinations fail at the same time.
Technical Breakdown
For Kafka exports, the blog describes multi-Kafka export where all configured clusters in the same setup receive the same session stream in parallel while their configurations remain independent. It gives an example in which production testing and evaluation clusters can run at the same time.
For IPFIX, the blog says ASN supports sending session and flow data to multiple IPFIX collectors up to six in real time using RFC 7011 templates. It also states that IPFIX export, like Kafka export, uses independent configuration including an export interval per destination and the same metadata selection approach.
Operational Impact
The blog describes operational scenarios for network operations teams, including isolating different analytics, security, and compliance domains without operational interference between them. It also cites use cases for managed service providers and operations teams that need separate clusters for customer needs and testing.
It further explains that configuration predictability comes from each update providing a full description of the desired state for every destination. The blog also states that if one destination fails to load, export continues to remaining successful destinations.
Conclusion
The blog’s overall takeaway is that ASN adds native support for simultaneous multi-destination export of session and flow data, supporting parallel delivery to multiple Kafka clusters and IPFIX collectors with independent behavior and a zero-downtime reconfiguration model. This “Blog Signals brief” is a fact-based summary of the vendor blog.
Source: aviznetworks.com, by Nandhinie Annadurrai.