Patent ID: 8711852

Claim:
A port mirroring method with a network-scoped connection-oriented sink, comprising: provisioning a layer two point-to-point connection within an Ethernet switch from a mirror port to a sink port, wherein the sink port requires no special provisioning for the port mirroring, wherein the layer two point-to-point connection is terminated on a second Ethernet switch comprising the sink port; designating a mirror type of the mirror port, wherein the mirror type comprises both egress and ingress; copying packets from the mirror port responsive to the mirror type; adding a unique layer two point-to-point connection identification tag to egress and ingress flows, thereby allowing the egress and ingress flows to be mirrored to the same sink port; forwarding the copied packets to the sink port on the provisioned layer two point-to-point connection within the Ethernet switch, wherein the copied packets are addressed to the layer two point-to-point connection to the second Ethernet switch; and processing the egress and ingress flows at the sink port using the layer two point-to-point connection identification tag to identify the egress and ingress flows; wherein the provisioned layer two point-to-point connection comprises a connection-oriented technique established in a same manner and modality as normal connections such that the sink port requires no special knowledge of a mirrored flow and such that the copied packets are forwarded and addressed to the layer two point-to-point connection instead of any device attached to the second Ethernet switch.