Patent ID: 7940658

Claim:
A method comprising: discovering a Layer 3 (L3) source device and an L3 destination device, wherein the L3 source device passes target traffic to the L3 destination device that is monitored via the L3 destination device in a remote traffic monitoring session; identifying configurations of the L3 source device and the L3 destination device to be used for establishing the remote traffic monitoring session between the L3 source device and the L3 destination device; determining common remote monitoring capabilities of the L3 source device and the L3 destination device; negotiating at least one parameter for the remote traffic monitoring session to create a unique identifier for the session to uniquely identify a flow of the target traffic from the L3 source device to the L3 destination device; and establishing the remote traffic monitoring session using information pertaining to the configurations, the common remote monitoring capabilities, and the at least one parameter.