Patent attributes
A network appliance deployed in a visibility fabric may intelligently drop certain low priority traffic to avoid indiscriminate dropping of data packets across all flow maps during periods of high congestion. More specifically, the network appliance may determine the data packets of a flow map should be dropped based on priority measures assigned on a per-flow map basis. Such a technique enables the network appliance to drop low priority traffic and forward high priority traffic downstream. Also introduced herein are techniques for metering traffic in order to gain better control over the traffic that is forwarded to an egress port of a network appliance. Because a network tool connected to the egress port can become easily overwhelmed, the network appliance may filter the traffic based on the priority of the flow maps to ensure that the network tool does not receive more traffic than can be handled.
