Patent ID: 7894434

Claim:
A method for capturing site-to-site traffic data in Multiprotocol Label Switching-Virtual Private Network (MPLS-VPN) based networks comprising: computing a source Provider Edge (PE) IP address and a source PE interface name for each flow record captured at a destination PE router, wherein each flow record includes a traffic record of IP packets traversing from a source PE router to the destination PE router in the MPLS-VPN network, and wherein computing the source PE IP address and source PE interface name comprises: querying a VPN provisioning system database to retrieve Virtual Route Forward (VRF) names; querying the VPN provisioning system database and an associated PE router to obtain a VPN site name, a PE router IP address, VPN routing information and interface name associated with each VRF name for each flow record; forming a VPN route database using the obtained VPN site name, PE router IP address, VPN routing information and interface name; and dynamically updating each flow record with the source VPN site information by using the VPN route database; and identifying a source VPN site by querying the VPN provisioning system database and the associated PE router based on the computed source PE IP address and the source PE interface name for each flow record traversing from the source PE router to the destination PE router, and wherein the source VPN site accesses the MPLS-VPN network through the source PE router.