Because Beeks Analytics performs its analysis on packets that traverse one or more points on the network, it needs to be provided with a copy of the packets that are crossing these points in the network. This is known as traffic mirroring.

There are three principle ways in which traffic can be mirrored from a network to a monitoring device:

• Optical Taps

• Port Mirroring

• Layer 1 switching

Latency Impact of Traffic Mirroring

All three methods (optical taps, port mirroring, Layer 1 switches) generally introduce negligible latency. Optical taps and Layer 1 switches are particularly known for near-zero latency impact. Port mirroring can introduce slight additional switch processing delays, but in most scenarios, these delays are minimal compared to higher-layer processing.