Shared optical performance monitoring

An apparatus for shared optical performance monitoring (OPM) is provided. A wavelength sensitive device receives light at an input port and routes it wavelength selectively to a set of output ports. To perform optical performance monitoring on the output ports, a monitoring component of each output signal is extracted, and these monitoring components are then combined. A single OPM function is then performed on the combined signal. However, with knowledge of the wavelengths that were included in each output signal, a virtual OPM function can be realized for each output port. The per port functionality can include total power per port, power per wavelength per port, variable optical attentuation, dynamic gain equalization, the latter two examples requiring feedback.