Network administrators at a medical facility cannot log in to network devices because of excessive...

The scenario described—where high CPU utilization prevents administrators from accessing device management interfaces—is a classic indication that the device'sControl Planeis being overwhelmed by malicious or malformed traffic (such as a DoS attack or a routing loop). To protect the "brains" of the network device,Control Plane Policing (CoPP)must be implemented.

CoPP allows an engineer to define filter and rate-limit policies specifically for traffic destined for the CPU. By categorizing traffic into different classes (e.g., routing protocols, management traffic like SSH, and "catch-all" untrusted traffic), CoPP ensures that critical management and control traffic is prioritized while excessive or suspicious traffic is dropped before it can impact the device’s performance. This maintainsoperational efficiencyeven during a traffic spike or attack. WhileAAA(Option B) handles authentication andRBAC(Option D) manages permissions once a user is logged in, neither can prevent the CPU exhaustion that blocks the login attempt in the first place.SNMP(Option C) is used for monitoring but does not provide active traffic policing. Within the Cisco SDSI framework, CoPP is a fundamental "Self-Defending Network" feature required to ensure the availability and resilience of the core infrastructure.

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