You can activate flow-based monitoring for a monitoring session by entering the
flow-based enable command in the Monitor Session mode. When you enable this
capability, traffic with particular flows that are traversing through the ingress and
egress interfaces are examined and, appropriate ACLs can be applied in both the
ingress and egress direction. Flow-based monitoring conserves bandwidth by
monitoring only specified traffic instead all traffic on the interface. This feature is
particularly useful when looking for malicious traffic. It is available for Layer 2 and
Layer 3 ingress and egress traffic. You may specify traffic using standard or
extended access-lists. This mechanism copies all incoming or outgoing packets on
one port and forwards (mirrors) them to another port. The source port is the
monitored port (MD) and the destination port is the monitoring port (MG).
372 Access Control Lists (ACL)