Packet Filtering
Each packet can be optionally compared against a number of pre-defined filtering rules. A rule can be defined to trigger on most any L2, L3 or L4 header field(s). The most common fields for filtering rules are IP address (source and/or destination), TCP/UDP port (or a range), protocol, VLAN id and MPLS tag. Rules can be defined so that they trigger on both sides of a bi-directional UDP or TCP session.
Once a packet filter matches, actions such as; drop, U-turn (local retransmit) or steer traffic to a specific host packet buffer can be applied to guide a packet along a desired path.
Deduplication
Most network monitoring appliances receive a significant number of duplicate packets; sometimes as high as 50% of all traffic. This is often because a SPAN port is configured to copy ingress and egress data from every switch port, which leads to duplicate packets for every packet that goes into and then out of a network switch. ANIC adapters can discard all duplicate packets in hardware before they ever reach the host application, thus saving a tremendous number of wasted processing cycles.