Oversubscription of monitor ports can occur in various network environments as a result of high or significant amounts of micro-bursts, which are very short (much less than a second) durations of data that spike above the average utilization of a network or port. These micro-bursts are the result of either issues in the network (e.g. congestion causing data queuing and jitter) or as-expected characteristics of data (e.g. video which is bursty by definition).
These oversubscribing micro-bursts, although very short, can result in packet loss at a traffic capture device's monitor ports (it does not affect the actual network traffic) when aggregating, load balancing, and/or speed-converting (e.g. 10G to 1G) traffic towards the monitoring tools.
VSS' High Data Burst Buffer feature provides extensive buffering for handling the combination of high network utilization and extreme micro-bursts without loss of any packets being forwarded to the monitoring tools. The feature is available on the Expert editions of the Distributed Traffic Capture Systems™ (DTCS).
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