Patent attributes
Techniques are described for providing traffic-aware sampling rate adjustment within network devices. As inbound packets are received at an interface, a sampling unit of a forwarding circuit of the network device samples the inbound packets at a current sampling rate and directs a subset of the inbound packets to a service card of the network device. A flow controller within the service card of the network device processes the subset of the inbound packets to generate flow records. When changes in the rate at which the inbound packets are received exceed a defined threshold, the flow controller adjusts the current sampling rate at which the forwarding circuit samples the inbound packets received at the interface. Moreover, the flow controller adaptively adjusts the sampling rate such that the flow sampling resources the device are being utilized in accordance with the utilization thresholds.
