Utilization of visibility feature to obtain and incorporate drop reasons into mirror on drop reports

A network device comprising:

• a host CPU;
• a data plane connected to the host CPU and configured to process received packets;
• a visibility memory connected to the host CPU and the data plane;
• wherein the host CPU is configured to, in response to detecting a dropped packet dropped by a pipeline of the data plane, generate a visibility packet which includes the dropped packet and one or more additional headers, the one or more additional headers including a set visibility indicator, and route the visibility packet to the pipeline of the data plane that processed and dropped the dropped packet;
• wherein the pipeline that dropped the dropped packet is configured to process the visibility packet and, in response to detecting the set visibility indicator, store processing information associated with the processing of the visibility packet by the pipeline in the visibility memory;
• and
• wherein the host CPU is configured to retrieve the processing information stored in the visibility memory and provide at least a portion of the retrieved processing information to a dropped packet information collector external to the network device.