Traffic Monitoring On Switched Network

Traffic monitoring on switched network is really very hard to do in the absence of a port mirroring or any other technique like RMON or SMON are employed in

a switch. Switched Network traffic monitoring is difficult because of the facts that in a bridged network which is formed by joining different network switches, all ports are lonely until one transmits data. Moreover, when data is transferred, then only the sending and receiving ports can see the traffic. These features of monitoring traffic on a switched network are seldom present on consumer-grade switches.

There are two commonly used practices employed to monitor traffic on a switched network in which there are permissions granted to a network analyst to monitor traffic. These are defined below:

Port mirroring: This technique of traffic monitoring on switched network is employed to send a copy of network packets visible on one switch port on to a network monitoring connection on another switch port.

Port Mirroring method of traffic monitoring on switched network is applied in those networks where the appliances ask for traffic monitoring like intrusion-detection system.

Switch Monitoring or SMON: This technique of traffic monitoring on switched network is illustrated by RFC 2613 and is a standard protocol for controlling facilities like port mirroring.

In computer networks, the Switch Monitoring technique can be defined as a set of MIB extensions for RMON which facilitate monitoring of switching equipment through a single management workstation in far greater detail as compared to the RMON. SMON is also called as Oracle System Monitor because it has a Oracle background process formed when user initiate a database instance. The SMON process includes instance recovery, cleans up after dirty shutdowns and coalesces adjacent free extents into larger free extents.

Another technique which can also be used for monitoring traffic on a switched network is by connecting a Layer-1 hub between the monitored device and its switch port. It would bring on minor delay, however it will also result in providing multiple interfaces which could be used to monitor the individual switch port. These days there are automatic devices available on the internet for the purpose of traffic monitoring on swirtcged network.