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The purpose of this paper is to present SMARTxAC, a tailor‐made passive monitoring and analysis system for high‐speed IP networks. The authors also discuss the design challenges we had to face to cope with the requirements of such a system.

This system has been designed to operate at gigabit speeds without packet loss, while providing very detailed information about the network usage.

SMARTxAC has become a very powerful tool for the network operators of the Catalan Research and Education Network (Anella Científica) to know, in detail, the usage of their network and to detect network faults, anomalies and attacks when they occur.

In the design of this system, the authors had to trade generality for performance in order to address the current limitations of monitoring high‐speed links.

Since 2003, SMARTxAC has been used for continuously monitoring the Anella Científica.

The main difference between SMARTxAC and other monitoring systems and infrastructures for high‐speed networks is that SMARTxAC has been explicitly designed to analyse the network traffic online, whereas in other approaches, traffic analysis tasks are usually postponed to an off‐line stage.