A company recently experienced outages of one of its critical, customer-facing applications.

The best answer is SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol). SNMP enables monitoring of network devices (routers, switches, firewalls, servers) and provides performance data such as CPU usage, bandwidth utilization, and interface status. In this scenario, if SNMP monitoring had been in place, administrators would have received alerts that the router was overutilized before customers noticed outages.

A. Packet capture (e.g., Wireshark) is useful for deep troubleshooting but is reactive, not proactive, and not scalable for continuous monitoring.

C. Syslog collects log messages but generally does not provide proactive resource utilization metrics. It is complementary but not the best fit for this problem.

D. SIEM aggregates logs and security events for analysis, but the primary requirement here is performance and availability monitoring.

By implementing SNMP monitoring (and potentially integrating it with a network monitoring tool such as Nagios, PRTG, or SolarWinds), the organization can track utilization trends, set thresholds, and automatically generate alerts, thereby preventing downtime from going unnoticed.

References (CompTIA Network+ N10-009):

Domain: Network Operations — SNMP monitoring, proactive network performance management.