Port Monitor Commands 62732Port Monitor CommandsDell Networking N2000/N3000/N4000 Series SwitchesDell Networking switches allow the user to monitor traffic with an externalnetwork analyzer. The external network analyzer can use any of the Ethernetports as a probe port. The probe port transmits a mirror copy of the trafficbeing probed. Network traffic transmission is always disrupted whenever aconfiguration change is made for port monitoring. Therefore, whenever portmonitoring is enabled, the probe port does not always forward traffic as anormal port. When diagnosing problems, an operator should always check thestatus of port monitoring.The port monitoring feature allows the user to configure a single probesession. A session consists of one destination or probe port and one ormultiple source ports. When a session is enabled, any traffic entering orleaving the source ports of that session is copied (mirrored) onto thecorresponding destination port. A network traffic analyzer can be attached todestination ports to analyze the traffic patterns of source ports.A session is operationally active only if both a destination port and at leastone source port are configured. If neither is true, the session is inactive. A portconfigured as a destination port acts as a mirroring port when the session isoperationally active. If it is not, the port acts as a normal port and participatesin all normal operation with respect to transmitting traffic.Any Ethernet port may be configured as a source port.Caveats:• Platforms may behave unpredictably if an attempt is made to mirror a portof greater speed than the probe port.• Once configured, there is no network connectivity on the probe(destination) port. The probe port does not forward any traffic and doesnot receive any traffic. The probe tool attached to the probe port is unableto ping the networking device or ping through the networking device, andno device is able to ping the probe tool.• ACL attributes redirect, mirror, log, rate-limit, assign-queue, time-range,IGMP type, ICMP type, ICMP code, routing, fragments, and TCPestablished are not supported when applied to a mirroring session.
