Performance of traffic monitoring actions

A non-transitory machine-readable medium storing a program which when executed by at least one processing unit performs data traffic monitoring, the program comprising sets of instructions for:

• for each packet processing stage of a set of packet processing stages, including first and second packet processing stages, in a packet processing pipeline:
• determining whether a packet received by the packet processing pipeline specifies a set of monitoring actions to be performed on the packet;
• when the packet specifies a set of monitoring action, determining whether the monitoring actions in the set are supported by the packet processing stage;
• and
• executing any supported monitoring action on the packet in addition to processing the packet according to configuration data for the stage,
• wherein at least one particular monitoring action is supported by at least the first packet processing stage but not supported by the second packet processing stage, which causes the first packet processing stage to execute the particular monitoring action and the second packet processing stage not to execute the particular monitoring action.

A computing device comprising:

• a set of processing units;
• and
• a non-transitory machine-readable medium storing a program which when executed by at least one of the processing units performs data traffic monitoring, the program comprising sets of instructions for:
• for each packet processing stage of a set of packet processing stages in a packet processing pipeline:
• determining whether a packet received by the packet processing pipeline specifies a set of monitoring actions to be performed on the packet;
• when the packet specifies a set of monitoring action, determining whether the monitoring actions in the set are supported by the packet processing stage;
• and
• executing the supported monitoring actions on the packet in addition to processing the packet according to configuration data for the stage,
• wherein at least one particular packet processing stage in the packet processing pipeline supports a particular monitoring action that is not supported by other packet processing stages in the packet processing pipeline.