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Note: The following is an excerpt from the official IETF RFC. It is provided here as a convenience and is not authoritative. Refer to the original document as the authoritative reference.

Traffic on a data network can be seen as consisting of flows passing through network elements. For administrative or other purposes, it is often interesting, useful, or even necessary to have access to information about these flows that pass through the network elements. A Collecting Process should be able to receive the Flow information passing through multiple network elements within the data network. This requires uniformity in the method of representing the flow information and the means of communicating the flows from the network elements to the collection point. This document specifies a protocol to achieve these requirements. This document specifies in detail the representation of different flows, as well as the additional data required for flow interpretation, packet format, transport mechanisms used, security concerns, etc.