Reference Guide

Port Monitoring | 691
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Port Monitoring
Port Monitoring is supported on the S5000 switch.
Port Monitoring is a feature that copies all incoming or outgoing packets on one port and forwards
(mirrors) them to another port. The source port is the monitored port (MD) and the destination port is the
monitoring port (MG).
This chapter is divided into the following sections:
• Important Points to Remember
• Port Monitoring on the S5000
• Configuring Port Monitoring
Important Points to Remember
• Port Monitoring is supported on physical ports only; VLAN and port-channel interfaces do not support
port monitoring.
• The Monitored (source, “MD”) and Monitoring ports (destination, “MG”) must be on the same switch.
• In general, a monitoring port should have
no ip address and no shutdown as the only configuration; Dell
Networking OS permits a limited set of commands for monitoring ports; display them using the
command
?. A monitoring port also may not be a member of a VLAN.
• There may only be one destination port in a monitoring session.
• A source port (MD) can only be monitored by one destination port (MG). The following error is
displayed if you try to assign a monitored port to more than one monitoring port.
Dell(conf)#mon ses 1
Dell(conf-mon-sess-1)#$gig 0/0 destination gig 0/60 direction both
Dell(conf-mon-sess-1)#do show mon ses
SessionID Source Destination Direction Mode Type
--------- ------ ----------- --------- ---- ----
1 Te 0/0 Te 0/60 both interface Port-based
Dell(conf-mon-sess-1)#mon ses 2
Dell(conf-mon-sess-2)#source gig 0/0 destination gig 0/61 direction both
% Error: MD port is already being monitored.
• The S5000 may only have four destination ports per port-pipe. There is no limitation on the total
number of monitoring sessions.