With the mirroring function, you can observe the traffic on a specific interface for locating faults on the network by obtaining packets sent to or received by the interface.
Interfaces on a network router often need to be monitored and analyzed during network operation. Directly monitoring or analyzing interfaces that are forwarding packets deteriorates the forwarding efficiency. To address this problem, you can configure the mirroring function. This allows a mirroring interface to copy sent or received packets to an observing port. After receiving the packets, the observing port sends the packets to its directly connected analyzer. This allows you to analyze mirrored packets to monitor network operation or locate faults in the network.
Port mirroring: The packets sent and received by a mirroring interface are completely copied to a specific observing port.
Flow mirroring: On the basis of traffic classification, only the packets that match specific rules are copied and the other packets are filtered out. By filtering out packets that the system does not concern about, the system to control packets with fine granularity and improving the efficiency for the packet analyzer.
Upstream mirroring: All packets or packets that match specific rules received by a mirroring interface are copied to a specific observing port.
Downstream mirroring: All packets or the packets that match specific rules to be sent by a mirroring interface are copied to a specific observing port.