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Glossary

Review the definitions for terms used across Cloudflare’s Magic Network Monitoring documentation.

TermDefinition
distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attackA DDoS attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt normal traffic of a targeted server, service, or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic.
flow dataRepresents records of communication between devices. There are a number of flow data protocols, such as NetFlow or sFlow.
NetFlowNetwork protocol developed by Cisco to collect and monitor network traffic flow data.
prefix

A number that identifies the network portion of an IP address. It tells devices if an IP address is on the same network or not. It is shown as a number after a slash (for example, /31) at the end of the IP address.

Using an analogy, the prefix is like a street address. If an IP is in the same street, it belongs to the same network of devices.

samplingIn the context of Magic Network Monitoring, sampling is the process of taking samples of packets for a specific period to identify potential attacks.
sFlowAn industry standard packet sampling protocol to monitor network devices.