Question

Difficulty: Very hardConfiguration and Change Management

During a scheduled maintenance window, a network engineer deploys a critical configuration update to an edge router to enable new BGP routing policies. Immediately following the change, internal monitoring alerts show severe packet loss across multiple subnets, and remote sites lose connectivity to the primary datacenter. The engineer suspects a misconfigured route map but realizes that testing during the window ran out of time. According to standard change management procedures, which of the following is the MOST appropriate immediate action for the engineer to take?

  1. Execute the documented rollback plan to restore the router to its pre-change configuration baseline.Answer
  2. B
    Perform emergency troubleshooting on the active production router and apply live configuration fixes to repair the route map.
  3. C
    Restore the router using the previous night's incremental backup to ensure all routing tables are reverted.
  4. D
    Update the official configuration baseline documentation to reflect the new BGP policy before continuing diagnostic tests.

Answer

The network engineer must immediately execute the documented rollback plan to return the edge router to its known good pre-change baseline.
Executing the pre-documented rollback plan is the mandatory action under change management frameworks when an update fails validation or causes an unplanned disruption. This action rapidly restores network services to a verified baseline state while preventing unapproved configuration drift.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Assess the impact of the change implementation
Severe packet loss and site disconnects indicate severe network instability resulting directly from the BGP change.
When a change causes unintended downtime and cannot be immediately rectified within the approved maintenance window bounds, change control rules require stopping implementation.
2
Evaluate remediation options against change control governance
Troubleshooting live in production risks prolonged downtime and unapproved drift, whereas executing the rollback plan returns services to operational status safely.
Rollback procedures are specifically designed and approved by the Change Advisory Board (CAB) prior to execution to handle implementation failures.
3
Execute the rollback procedure and perform post-incident review
The network returns to the baseline configuration, allowing for root-cause analysis in a sandbox environment before re-submitting a new Request for Change (RFC).
Returning to a stable state prioritizes business continuity while respecting configuration management policies.

Key Concept

Change Management Rollback Execution & Baseline Preservation
Estimated Time:2m 0s
Rate this question