US Patent 11288256 Dynamically providing keys to host for flow aggregation

Some embodiments provide a novel method for collecting and reporting attributes of data flows associated with machines executing on a plurality of host computers to an analysis appliance. The analysis appliance, in some embodiments, receives definitions of keys and provides them to the host computers. In some embodiments, existing keys are modified based on the analysis. Additionally, or alternatively, new keys are provided based on the analysis. In some embodiments, the analysis appliance receives the flow group records (e.g., sets of attributes) based on the keys and the configuration data from each host computer.