Does RMON function as a remote sniffer?
In a pinch, RMON can be used to remotely sniff traffic. The problem is that it isn’t very good at it. For example, with today’s sniffing products, you can easily do a packet capture of all traffic and save it real time to gigabyte disk drives. If you try to do that with RMON, you’ll find difficulties in trying to transfer all that data back to your management console. One way to reduce this data is to set packet capture filters. However, filtering is extremely weak in RMON. If you want to do sniffing, don’t rely upon RMON to do it for you. On the flip side, there is a big security concern that RMON is so pervasive on equipment throughout the Internet that you can often find open RMON probes that will allow remote sniffing. Again, it won’t provide very good sniffing capabilities, but it will be good enough.
