Mirror service overview

Traffic packet mirroring
CAUTION 

CAUTION

Service Disruption

Service mirroring can affect performance.

Service mirroring can affect performance across the network and in the source and destination devices, so must be planned accordingly.

The NFM-P GUI implementation of service mirroring provides mirroring of service traffic packets from any service type.

In a mirror service, packets from one or more sources are forwarded to their normal destinations and a copy of the entire packet, or a specified portion of the packet, is sent to the mirror destination. The mirrored packet can be viewed using a packet-decoding device, typically called a sniffer, that is attached to the destination port. The NFM-P does not limit the number of destination and source sites added under a mirror service. The mirrored packets are transported unidirectionally through the core network using IP or MPLS tunneling.

With pseudo-wire redundancy support, an ICB can be enabled in the mirror service spoke and remote source, which can provide bidirectional service that enables support for active and standby PE redundancy. An endpoint can be used to group the redundant objects, which may be of mirror SDP bindings or SDP and SAP. In the mirror map view, the color for the active and backup states of the redundant mirror SDP differ.

Service mirroring can be used to do the following:

Configuration methods

The NFM-P supports end-to-end mirror service configuration using the following methods:

Operational status

The mirror service operational status is aggregated based on the status of each site.

Implementation considerations

Consider the following before you implement a mirror service: