A network monitoring interface card or NMIC is similar to a

network card A network interface controller (NIC, also known as a network interface card, network adapter, LAN adapter or physical network interface, and by similar terms) is a computer hardware component that connects a computer to a computer network. E ...

(NIC). However, unlike a standard network card, an NMIC is designed to passively (and silently) listen on a network. At a functional level, an NMIC may differ from a NIC, in that the NMIC may not have a

MAC address A media access control address (MAC address) is a unique identifier assigned to a network interface controller (NIC) for use as a network address in communications within a network segment. This use is common in most IEEE 802 networking tec ...

, may lack the ability to transmit and may not announce its presence on a network. Advanced NMICs have features that include an ability to offload CPU intensive processing from a system's CPU, accurate time measurement, traffic filtering, and an ability to perform other application specific processing. Organizations often use a dedicated interface for all management traffic and thus create a ''management network''. This is done to minimize the impact on production traffic, ensure the integrity of management traffic and it helps by measuring true production traffic not the traffic generated to the act of measuring traffic. This is a separate function from NMICs that are used for data collection and processing. NMICs are typically used in intrusion detection and prevention (IDS/IPS),

lawful interception Lawful interception (LI) refers to the facilities in telecommunications and telephone networks that allow law enforcement agencies with court orders or other legal authorization to selectively wiretap individual subscribers. Most countries requir ...

, flow analysis,

network monitoring Network monitoring is the use of a system that constantly monitors a computer network for slow or failing components and that notifies the network administrator (via email, SMS or other alarms) in case of outages or other trouble. Network monitorin ...

, and protocol analyzer systems. Notable manufacturers include

Endace Endace Ltd is a privately owned network monitoring company, based in New Zealand and founded in 2001. It provides network visibility and network recording products to large organizations. The company was listed on the London Stock Exchange in 20 ...

SolarFLare Xilinx, Inc. ( ) was an American technology and semiconductor company that primarily supplied programmable logic devices. The company was known for inventing the first commercially viable field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and creating the fi ...

and

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the devel ...

See also