Mini-Protocol Analyzer (Mpa) - Cisco Catalyst 6500-E Series Manual

Switch as the backbone of a unified access campus architecture

Hide thumbs Also See for Catalyst 6500-E Series:

Table of Contents

Figure 19.

Use Cases for Application Visibility and Control

Figure 19 shows many of the reasons why application visibility and control are so crucial to maintaining the unified

access campus architecture. Whether it is for capacity planning, security, corporate compliance, or other reasons,

it is vital that network administrators have an understanding of the users and traffic in their infrastructure. The

Cisco Catalyst 6500-E with Supervisor Engine 2T supports a wide array of features that enable the network

administrator to gain the necessary visibility into the network to make sure of delivery of a consistent end-to-end

user experience. These features include, but are not limited to, Mini-Protocol Analyzer, Flexible NetFlow, and

medianet, all of which are discussed in further detail in this section.

Mini-Protocol Analyzer (MPA)

The ability to inspect the entire content of a packet, also known as "packet capture" or "sniffing," is sometimes a

crucial part to troubleshooting a network problem, and that is the ability delivered by the Mini-Protocol Analyzer

(MPA). The MPA captures network traffic from a SPAN session and stores the captured packets in a PCAP format

in a local memory buffer. The captured packets can be either locally analyzed or exported to another device for

analysis. Filtering options allow the network administrator to limit the captured packets to from selected VLANs,

ACLs, or MAC addresses; packets of a specific EtherType; or packets of a specified packet size. Captures can be

started and stopped on demand or can be scheduled for a specific date and time. An MPA session could be part

of an EEM script that is implemented as the result of another event in the system.

The captured data can be displayed on the console, stored to a local file system, or exported to an external server

using normal file transfer protocols. The format of the captured file is libpcap, which is supported by many packet

analysis and sniffer programs (such as WireShark). Figure 20 shows some of the configuration options for the

MPA.

Page 19 of 28

Table of Contents