Gigamon Inc.

Yingchun Ma

Zbigniew Sufleta

Yan Xiu

Ramakrishna Manchiraju-Venkata

A packet broker deployed in a visibility fabric may intelligently assign identifiers to data packets that are routed through sequences of one or more network tools for monitoring and/or security purposes. Guiding techniques based on these identifiers offer flexible support for multiple network tool operational modes. For example, the packet broker may be able to readily address changes in the state of a network tool connected to the packet broker by modifying certain egress translation schemes and/or ingress translation schemes. The 'state' of a network tool can be 'up' (i.e., ready for service) or &#x201c;down&#x201d; (i.e., out of service) based on, for example, the network tool's ability to pass through health-probing data packets dispatched by the packet broker.

Status monitoring of inline network tools

A packet broker deployed in a visibility fabric may intelligently assign identifiers to data packets that are routed through sequences of one or more network tools for monitoring and/or security purposes. Guiding techniques based on these identifiers offer flexible support for multiple network tool operational modes. For example, the packet broker may be able to readily address changes in the state of a network tool connected to the packet broker by modifying certain egress translation schemes and/or ingress translation schemes. The 'state' of a network tool can be 'up' (i.e., ready for service) or 'down' (i.e., out of service) based on, for example, the network tool's ability to pass through health-probing data packets dispatched by the packet broker.

A packet broker deployed in a visibility fabric may intelligently assign identifiers to data packets that are routed through sequences of one or more network tools for monitoring and/or security purposes. However, in some instances, it may be desirable for data packets the one or more network tools in a load-balanced manner rather than a cascaded manner. Accordingly, the packet broker may initially form a trunk group (i.e., a predefined group of ports that are treated as one port) based on input provided by an administrator. A group of network tools that share a load (i.e., a traffic flow) through trunking facilitated by the packet broker are referred to as a 'trunk group' of network tools.

Statistical multiplexing of inline network tools

A packet broker deployed in a visibility fabric may intelligently assign identifiers to data packets that are routed through sequences of one or more network tools for monitoring and/or security purposes. More specifically, the packet broker may apply packet-matching criteria to incoming data packets to determine a predetermined sequence of network tools through which the data packets are to be guided. For example, the packet broker may guide a data packet through a predetermined sequence of network tools by translating an internal identifier added to the data packet to an external identifier before transmission to each of the network tools, and translating the external identifier to a different internal identifier each time the data packet is received from each of the network tools.

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Sunnyvale, CA, United States of America

Yingchun Ma