The invention discloses an SDN-based active-passive adaptive traffic measurement method and device to reduce the overhead of traffic measurement and to improve the accuracy and the timeliness of measurement. The method includes: S1, constructing a traffic matrix TM, initializing a matrix value to 0, and constructing an active flow list; S2: instructing a timer to poll a switch periodically for active traffic measurement for a new flow and the flows in the active flow list, updating the TM according to a value obtained by the active measurement and items corresponding to the active flow list, adjusting the value of the timer according to an adaptive algorithm in the process of active measurement, creating items corresponding to the new flow in the active flow list when the new flow is generated; and S3, using passive measurement at the end of the flow and updating the TM according to a received message sent by the switch and a corresponding items in the active flow list.