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Difficulty: MediumNetwork Performance Monitoring and Metrics

Following a compliance audit, a network engineer must establish centralized performance polling for hardware metrics including CPU utilization, memory usage, and interface throughput across core enterprise routers. The organization's security policy strictly mandates that all monitoring telemetry communications must enforce cryptographic user authentication and encrypt all payload data in transit to prevent eavesdropping. Which protocol and security level combination should the engineer implement to satisfy these requirements?

  1. SNMPv3 configured with the authPriv security levelAnswer
  2. B
    SNMPv3 configured with the authNoPriv security level
  3. C
    SNMPv2c configured with complex read-only community strings
  4. D
    Standard Syslog transmitted over UDP port 514

Answer

SNMPv3 configured with the authPriv security level
SNMPv3 with authPriv (Authentication and Privacy) provides both cryptographic authentication and full payload encryption. This ensures that SNMP polling requests for core metrics are authenticated and that telemetry data in transit cannot be read by unauthorized packet sniffers.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the performance monitoring mechanism required.
System metric polling (CPU, memory, bandwidth) requires a structured management protocol like SNMP rather than an event logging protocol like Syslog.
SNMP provides structured OID polling capabilities suited for device health telemetry.
2
Evaluate the security requirements specified in the scenario.
The requirements demand both cryptographic user authentication and payload encryption of traffic in transit.
Security mandates require protection against unauthorized polling access and eavesdropping.
3
Select the SNMP version and security level that satisfies both requirements.
SNMPv3 with authPriv (Authentication and Privacy) provides HMAC authentication and AES/DES payload encryption.
authNoPriv lacks encryption, noAuthNoPriv lacks both, and SNMPv2c sends plain-text community strings without security.

Key Concept

SNMPv3 Security Levels and Telemetry Security
Estimated Time:1m 15s
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Topics

Network Performance Monitoring and Metrics

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