sujay,
So what I am proposing ( and is possible) is that under these conditions like O/L , soft restart the system (switch/router) can easily send to the collector at least the "duration under which it was in the O/L/reset condition" . This information I am thinking would be useful as a rough estimate of monitoring lost, canbe converted in to number of packets not accounted for
No, it can't.There are too many variables which the collecting process would have to know. eg how many active monitoring processes are there on the exporting device, and how much traffic are they each measuring on average?
The delay between measuring and exporting, and the flow lifetime on the switch will also be relevant, since you'll export some partially filled flows for some period of time after the reset.
or may be used as an unaccounted period by the collector.
I think that's the only possibility. Let's not try to guess how much traffic was lost.
Cheers, P. -- Paul Aitken Cisco Systems Ltd, Edinburgh, Scotland.