Configuring a SPAN session.

A SPAN session is a way for you to have the traffic that is transmitted and/or received from one port or VLAN and have it forwarded out another port for analysis purposes. It’s very easily configured by a few small statements and the only thing you have to decide on is which port you want to monitor, the traffic flow you want to see from that port (egress, ingress, or both) and the destination port you want the traffic sent to. (See the configuration below)

Note: For this local SPAN session both the source port and destination port must be on the same switch. RSPAN allows SPAN sessions across remote switches, but I will not be covering RSPAN in this post.

Their isn’t much to consider concerning the source port since it will not be effected at all, the destination port however is treated a bit differently. First off the destination port will be put in a “Monitor” mode, meaning traffic received on this port will be dropped. Only traffic from the source port will be transmitted out of the destination port by the switch that’s it.

You can issue the sh monitor session # command to see if their are any active SPAN sessions on the switch, or if you want to see the details of a configured SPAN session. The source port (fa0/1), traffic flow (both), destination port (fa0/2), and the encapsulation, are all shown in the command. To close down a SPAN session simply issue the no monitor session # command.

Now your next question might be, what are you going to use this for or why are you going analyze the traffic? Well, if the station at the destination port is running Wireshark, it’s a real easy way to get a glimpse at the traffic traversing your network. From their you can look through the data and see if anything sticks out. Alternatively you can have a SPAN session provide data to a IDS/IPS system so it can monitor your network for any abnormalities.