Configuring the Cisco Nexus 5000 Series for Port Mirroring

The Cisco Nexus 5000 Series switch supports the switched port analyzer (SPAN) feature, which allows an administrator to analyze all traffic between ports by nonintrusively directing the SPAN session traffic to a SPAN destination port that has an external analyzer attached to it. A source port, also called a monitored port, is a switched interface that you monitor for network traffic analysis. The switch supports any number of ingress source ports (up to the maximum number of available ports on the switch) and any number of source VLANs or VSANs.

Note: USM Anywhere supports SPAN, RSPAN, ERSPAN, and VMware Encapsulated Remote Mirroring (L3) Source, which is an ERSPAN-like feature.

To configure the device

  1. Open a monitor session.

  2. Enter global configuration mode.

    #configure terminal

  3. Enter interface configuration mode for the specified Ethernet interface selected by the port values.

    #interface ethernet [port]

  4. Set the interface to monitor mode.

    #switchport monitor

    Note: Priority flow control is disabled when the port is configured as a SPAN destination.

  5. Revert the global configuration mode.

    #exit

  6. Enter monitor configuration mode.

    #monitor session [session-number]

  7. Configure the Ethernet destination port.

    #destination interface ethernet [port]

To learn more about configuring port mirroring for the Cisco Nexus device, refer to the Configuring SPAN section of the Cisco Nexus 5000 Series NX-OS Software Configuration Guide on the vendor website.