Description: The statistical sampling rate for packet sampling from this source.

Set to N to sample 1/Nth of the packets in the monitored flows. An agent should choose its own algorithm introduce variance into the sampling so that exactly every Nth packet is not counted. A sampling rate of 1 counts all packets. A sampling rate of 0 disables sampling.

The agent is permitted to have minimum and maximum allowable values for the sampling rate. A minimum rate lets the agent designer set an upper bound on the overhead associated with sampling, and a maximum rate may be the result of hardware restrictions (such as counter size). In addition not all values between the maximum and minimum may be realizable as the sampling rate (again because of implementation considerations).

When the sampling rate is set the agent is free to adjust the value so that it lies between the maximum and minimum values

and has the closest achievable value.

When read, the agent must return the actual sampling rate it will be using (after the adjustments previously described). The sampling algorithm must converge so that over time the number of packets sampled approaches 1/Nth of the total number of packets in the monitored flows.