US Patent 7164657 Intelligent collaboration across network systems

A network monitoring system and method for analyzing network traffic is provided. This network monitoring system and method employ flow monitoring to analyze the traffic flow inside a switching device. All message packets entering the switching device are filtered and then sampled. After message packets are sampled, the switching device generates reporting packets containing network information related to the sampled packets. These reporting packets are then transmitted to a monitor server for analysis. Generally, the monitor server is coupled to a number of the switching devices so that the overall performance of the network can be gathered and presented to the users.