Least Burden Traffic Monitoring Technique

D.

When designing a traffic monitoring and analysis system, one of the important considerations is to minimize the impact on the network infrastructure. The network infrastructure should not be burdened with unnecessary traffic, which can cause performance degradation and affect user experience.

Out of the given options, the technique that places the least amount of burden on the network infrastructure is "passive taps."

A passive tap is a device that captures a copy of network traffic without altering the traffic in any way. It does not require any configuration or management from the network devices or infrastructure, which makes it an easy and straightforward solution. A passive tap is essentially a hardware device that sits between two network devices and simply copies the data as it flows between them. It is called "passive" because it does not actively participate in the network communication; it just listens.

In contrast, the other options require active participation from the network devices or infrastructure. For example, a SPAN (Switch Port Analyzer) port is a feature of network switches that allows the administrator to configure a port to copy traffic to another port for analysis. This technique requires the switch to perform extra processing and can affect the performance of the switch and the network. Similarly, NetFlow and IP NBAR both require the network devices to generate and send additional data to a monitoring device, which can consume network resources and affect network performance.

In summary, when designing a traffic monitoring and analysis system, if the goal is to minimize the impact on the network infrastructure, the recommended technique would be "passive taps."