Cisco Certified Network Professional 2025 – 400 Free Practice Questions to Pass the Exam

The correct interpretation of monitoring capabilities within a SPAN (Switched Port Analyzer) configuration is that it can monitor traffic specific to designated ports or VLANs, depending on how it is configured. SPAN allows for the mirroring of network traffic from one or more ports (or VLANs) to another port for analysis.

When configured properly, SPAN can be set to monitor all traffic going through a selected VLAN or specific ports. If the SPAN is set to monitor a specific access VLAN, it will only capture the traffic associated with that designated VLAN. Therefore, if one were to configure SPAN to monitor only access VLAN traffic, it would specifically focus on the data packets belonging to that VLAN, excluding other traffic.

Monitoring of all VLANs or ports is not the default configuration and requires explicit settings to achieve that broader scope. Similarly, SPAN does not focus solely on management traffic nor does it generally monitor redundant network paths, as these configurations involve more advanced monitoring setups typically handled by protocols specifically designed for redundancy or management traffic analysis.

Thus, the answer highlights a specific scenario where SPAN is utilized to focus on access VLAN traffic, underscoring its ability to target particular layers of network traffic for a more controlled monitoring approach.