US Patent 10887361 Port mirroring in overlay networks

A method of mirroring packets in a network. The method assigns an Internet protocol (IP) multicast address to an overlay network for transmitting mirrored packets. The method connects a set of monitoring data compute nodes (DCNs) to the overlay network for receiving the mirrored packets. The method adds the monitoring DCNs to an IP multicast group for the overlay network. The method associates a port of a mirrored DCN to the overlay network for packet mirroring. The method duplicates each packet received or transmitted at the port as a mirrored packet. The method encapsulates each mirrored packet with the IP multicast address of the overlay network. The method transmits each encapsulated packet on the overlay network.