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US 2008/0175162 A1Published application
Triggering flow analysis at intermediary devices
AssigneeCisco Technology, Inc.
InventorsDaniel G. Wing, Robert J. Biskner, Rajesh Kumar, Mohamed S. Mostafa
Life of this patent
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Abstract
In one embodiment, a router examines an incoming packet for a flow monitoring request. The router may examine every packet for the flow monitoring request, or preferably may only examine packets including a lifetime value indicating that the packet should be dropped and not forwarded or may only examine packets having a predetermined message format. When the flow monitoring request is included, the router performs detailed flow analysis or other monitoring according to the flow monitoring request.
Claims20
An apparatus, comprising:
- one or more processors;
- and
- a memory coupled to the one or more processors comprising instructions executable by the processors, the processors operable when executing the instructions to:
- decrement lifetime values of incoming packets before performing a forwarding function;
- identify one or more of the incoming packets containing decremented lifetime values indicating an exceeded lifetime;
- examine the identified packets having the exceeded lifetime for a monitoring request;
- and
- monitor a call flow according to the monitoring request.
5 more elements
A method comprising:
- receiving incoming packets;
- identifying one or more of the incoming packets as containing a predetermined message format;
- observing whether the identified packets include a trigger for initiating analysis of one or more data streams that terminate on a remote endpoint that generated and inserted the trigger;
- and
- initiating an analysis of the data streams in response to observing the trigger included in the identified packets.
2 more elements
An apparatus, comprising:
- means for generating a plurality of packets formatted to elicit one or more on-path intermediary devices to drop the packets and report an error before the packets reach a destination address included in the packets;
- and
- means for including a monitoring request in the packets, the monitoring request formatted to trigger the on-path intermediary devices to initiate monitoring of a call flow terminating on a remote endpoint having the destination address.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.