Best way to monitor traffic remotely?

[new2IT]

Lately I have been frequently required to monitor traffic at my work and often this requires setting up a laptop in a communications closet and setting up a span port on one of our Cisco switches with Wireshark capturing, (everything we have is all Cisco equipment). I'd much rather be able to sniff the traffic from the data center I usually work in but I'm not exactly sure the best approach to this.

I already know how to setup a span port to mirror traffic on a switch to another port connected to a PC running Wireshark for traffic sniffing, but I don't know how to do this remotely. From my understanding I would need to create a vlan specifically for remote span on both switches, the one I want to be connected to in the data center as well as whatever switch has the port I want to monitor. However, a co-worker was worried this could possibly produce unintentional effects on the network.

Is there another way I could sniff the data remotely? I was trying to see if I can do this straight though Wireshark's remote capture feature but I kept getting an error message when entering the remote PC's login information. Wireshark often crashes as well so this only adds to my desire to figure out how to do this remotely!

 

[CntdwnToExtn]

I thought Wireshark had "Promiscuous Mode"?
Allows the network card to see all traffic.

 

[new2IT]

Wireshark can only see what is on the local network, but can't see traffic on other vlans or other switches.