SD-WAN-Engineer Operations And Monitoring Practice Test 5 — 15 Questions

Question 1

An engineer is troubleshooting why a WAN edge device shows an out-of-sync state with the vSmart controller in vManage, even though the control connection appears to be up. Which TWO conditions should the engineer verify to explain an out-of-sync policy or configuration state? (Choose two.)

Choose an answer to begin — your selection is scored in the full session.

Accepted Answer

The device has not yet accepted or applied the pending configuration change.. Out-of-sync status in vManage indicates that the device's applied configuration or policy differs from the intended state. The usual causes are that a template or policy update has not been delivered, or that a pending change has not been accepted and applied. Certificate expiry, version differences, and NTP drift affect connectivity or validity but do not directly produce this configuration mismatch.

Answer

The vSmart controller is running a software version older than the WAN edge device.

Answer

The device's clock is not synchronized with an NTP server.

Answer

The device's certificate has expired and it is operating in a degraded mode.

Question 2

A network engineer is troubleshooting an issue where a vEdge device shows as unreachable in vManage, but the device is still forwarding traffic. The engineer suspects a problem with the control plane. Which CLI command on the vEdge should be used to check the status of its control connections to the vSmart controllers?

Accepted Answer

show control connections. On a vEdge, the command 'show control connections' lists all control plane connections to vSmart controllers and their states. If vManage shows the device as unreachable, checking this command helps determine if the control connections are down. Other commands like 'show interface' or 'show ip route' do not provide control connection status, and 'show omp peers' is more specific to OMP peering rather than the underlying control connection.

Answer

show interface

Answer

show omp peers

Answer

show ip route

Question 3

A network engineer is troubleshooting an SD-WAN overlay where a branch router's BFD sessions to two WAN transports keep flapping every few minutes. The engineer suspects the issue is related to the BFD hello interval and multiplier settings configured in the vManage feature template. Which CLI command on the branch router displays the current BFD session state and the negotiated transmit/receive intervals for each WAN transport?

Accepted Answer

show sdwan bfd sessions. BFD liveness detection in an SD-WAN overlay is configured through feature templates and negotiated per session. When sessions flap, the engineer must inspect the actual session state and the negotiated timers on the device. The command that lists BFD sessions along with their transmit/receive intervals and multiplier gives the precise data needed to compare against the intended template values and confirm whether a mismatch or transport issue is causing the flaps.

Answer

show ip route vrf 1

Answer

show sdwan omp routes

Answer

show sdwan control connections

Question 4

A network administrator is troubleshooting a performance issue where voice traffic is being routed over a less optimal path despite a better path being available. The administrator suspects that the Application-Aware Routing policy is not functioning as intended. Which two actions should be taken to verify that the policy is correctly applied and the SLA is being met? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Check the 'App Route' statistics in vManage for the site to see the path chosen for the voice application.. To verify application-aware routing for voice, you must confirm that the policy is selecting the correct path based on SLA. The App Route statistics in vManage show the chosen path per application, and BFD/SLA status confirms that the path meets the required thresholds. Without both, the policy cannot function as intended. Packet capture, OMP routes, and syslog do not directly show policy effectiveness.

Answer

Review the OMP routes to ensure the voice prefix is advertised with the correct TLOC.

Answer

Check the syslog on the branch router for messages about policy failures.

Answer

Run a packet capture on the voice VLAN to analyze the RTP stream.

Question 5

A network operations team is using Cisco vManage to manage a large SD-WAN fabric. They need to view a real-time, hop-by-hop path trace between a branch router and a data center application server to pinpoint where latency is being introduced. Which vManage feature should they use to capture this information?

Accepted Answer

vManage Real-Time Monitoring > Device > Troubleshooting > Path Trace. The Path Trace tool under Real-Time Monitoring is designed specifically for on-demand, hop-by-hop diagnostics across the SD-WAN overlay. It shows each device and interface traversed, along with latency and loss per hop, enabling the team to isolate the exact segment causing delay. Other monitoring views provide aggregate or single-device data and cannot replace a live path trace for this purpose.

Answer

Application-Aware Routing (AAR) policy

Answer

vManage Monitor > Network > Interface statistics

Answer

vManage Monitor > Applications > App Route statistics

Question 6

A junior engineer wants to quickly confirm whether a specific WAN edge device has established control connections to all three controller roles (vBond, vSmart, and vManage) after onboarding. Which vManage location provides this per-device control connection status view?

Accepted Answer

Monitor > Network > WAN Edge > Real Time > Control Connections. The real-time Control Connections view for a WAN edge device enumerates the DTLS connections to the vBond orchestrator, vSmart controllers, and vManage, showing their state. This is the most direct way to confirm that onboarding completed and all controller roles are reachable. Templates, cluster management, and interface views address configuration, management-plane health, and link counters respectively.

Answer

Configuration > Templates

Answer

Monitor > Network > WAN Edge > Real Time > Interface

Answer

Administration > Cluster Management

Question 7

A network administrator needs to monitor real-time application performance and path quality metrics for a specific site in Cisco vManage. Which menu should the administrator navigate to?

Accepted Answer

Monitor > Applications. The Monitor > Applications section in vManage is specifically designed to display application performance and path quality metrics such as latency, jitter, and packet loss. It aggregates data from Application Aware Routing and provides per-application and per-path visibility, making it the correct choice for real-time monitoring of application experience at a site.

Answer

Monitor > Network

Answer

Monitor > Alarms

Answer

Monitor > Logs

Question 8

A network administrator is investigating why application traffic from a branch site is being routed over the less-preferred MPLS transport instead of the local broadband circuit, even though the application-aware routing policy is configured to prefer broadband for that application. The administrator has already verified that the application is correctly identified and that both TLOCs are up. Which vManage monitoring view should the administrator check first to see the per-application path selection decisions and the reason a particular path was chosen?

Accepted Answer

Monitor > Applications > App Route. Application-aware routing decisions are made per flow based on the configured SLA classes and path preferences. To understand why a specific application took a particular path, the administrator needs visibility into the policy evaluation. The App Route monitoring view provides that per-application breakdown, showing the matched policy, the chosen path, and the alternative paths with their SLA metrics, which directly answers the question.

Answer

Monitor > Devices > WAN Edge

Answer

Monitor > Network > Topology

Answer

Monitor > Network > Interfaces

Question 9

A network operations team is troubleshooting an intermittent voice-quality complaint at a branch. In vManage they open the Troubleshooting pane for the affected device and run a bidirectional application-aware traffic flow test between the branch and the voice gateway. The test completes successfully, but the team wants to confirm which physical WAN transport and which local interface the simulated flow actually traversed. Where should they look in the test results?

Accepted Answer

The Flow Details section of the test output, which lists the ingress and egress interface names and the selected WAN transport for each direction of the simulated flow.. An application-aware flow test returns per-direction forwarding detail, including the egress interface and the WAN transport selected by the data plane. Reviewing that detail confirms the actual path rather than assuming the test used the same transport as production voice. Control connection status, system events, and interface counters describe other layers and cannot identify the transport of the simulated flow.

Answer

The Interface Utilization widget on the Monitor dashboard, which correlates the test timestamp with the busiest interface on the device.

Answer

The Control Connections table on the device dashboard, which shows the system IP of each vBond and the TLOC color currently in use.

Answer

The Events log filtered by severity level major, which records every packet-forwarding decision made by the data plane.

Question 10

During an incident, an engineer observes that a WAN edge device is dropping traffic on a specific tunnel, and wants to verify the BFD session state and the measured loss and latency for that tunnel. Which operational command on a Cisco IOS XE SD-WAN device provides this per-tunnel BFD detail?

Accepted Answer

show sdwan bfd sessions. BFD sessions provide the liveness and quality measurements that SD-WAN uses for path selection and failover. The BFD sessions command on a Cisco IOS XE SD-WAN device lists each session with its state and the measured latency, loss, and jitter, which is exactly the detail required to diagnose a tunnel that is dropping traffic. OMP peers, data policy, and local control properties address other aspects of the control and policy planes.

Answer

show sdwan control local-properties

Answer

show sdwan policy data-policy

Answer

show sdwan omp peers

Question 11

A network engineer is configuring a Cisco SD-WAN solution with two vSmart controllers in a high-availability pair. The engineer wants to ensure that if one vSmart controller fails, the WAN Edge devices automatically switch to the other controller without manual intervention. Which mechanism should the engineer verify is properly configured?

Accepted Answer

WAN Edge devices are configured with both vSmart controller IP addresses in their control connection list.. Cisco SD-WAN high availability for vSmart controllers is achieved by deploying multiple controllers and ensuring WAN Edge devices have their addresses. The WAN Edge learns the vSmart list from vBond and establishes control connections to all of them. If one vSmart fails, the WAN Edge continues using the remaining connections, providing seamless failover without manual intervention or reliance on external load balancers.

Answer

vSmart controllers are placed behind a load balancer that distributes traffic evenly.

Answer

vSmart controllers are configured with the same system IP address.

Answer

The vManage server is configured to automatically restart a failed vSmart controller.

Question 12

An engineer is designing monitoring for a dual-router branch where each router has two WAN transports. The requirement is to detect a degradation on a single transport before end users report poor application experience, and to distinguish a transport-wide problem from a single-site problem. Which two capabilities of the SD-WAN monitoring stack should be used to meet these requirements? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Configure per-tunnel BFD and application-aware enhanced SLA thresholds on the tunnel interfaces so that brownout conditions are detected and acted upon before a full tunnel failure.. Per-tunnel BFD with application-aware enhanced SLA classes detects brownouts on individual transports and triggers steering before a hard failure. ADEM scoring and synthetic probes provide experience baselines that let operators compare a site against a reference, separating transport-wide problems from single-site problems. Control-plane state, log volume, and byte counters do not measure per-transport quality at the granularity required.

Answer

Enable syslog forwarding of all severity informational messages to a collector and alert on any message volume increase, since degradation increases log volume.

Answer

Schedule a daily report of interface byte counters and treat any counter deviation from the previous day as a transport degradation event.

Answer

Rely on the OMP session state between the branch routers and the controllers, since a degraded transport will always tear down the OMP session and raise an alarm.

Question 13

A junior engineer needs to confirm that a specific branch router's control connections to all controllers are currently established and encrypted. Which vManage view should the engineer open for that single device to see the state of each control connection and the TLOC it uses?

Accepted Answer

Monitor > Network > the device > Control Connections, which lists each controller connection, its protocol, and its current state.. Control connections are per-device sessions to the vBond, vManage, and vSmart controllers. The device-level Control Connections view under Monitor > Network enumerates each session with its state and the TLOC carrying it, giving a direct answer about establishment and encryption for that router. Interface state, templates, and the audit log describe other concerns and cannot confirm live control-plane sessions.

Answer

Configuration > Templates, which shows the feature templates attached to the device and their variable values.

Answer

Monitor > Network > the device > Interfaces, which shows operational state and counters for every physical and logical interface.

Answer

Monitor > Logs > Audit Log, which records configuration changes made to the device over time.

Question 14

A network administrator is troubleshooting an SD-WAN issue where a branch site's voice traffic is experiencing poor quality. The administrator suspects that the issue is related to the Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) sessions used for Application-Aware Routing. Which vManage monitoring view should the administrator check to see the BFD session status and performance metrics for the tunnels from that branch?

Accepted Answer

Monitor > Network > WAN Edge > Tunnel. The Tunnel view under Monitor > Network > WAN Edge is the correct place to check BFD session status and performance metrics such as latency, jitter, and loss for each tunnel. Since Application-Aware Routing relies on BFD to measure path quality, this view directly supports diagnosing voice quality issues. Other views lack the combination of BFD state and per-tunnel performance data.

Answer

Monitor > Network > WAN Edge > Interface

Answer

Monitor > Network > WAN Edge > Control Connections

Answer

Monitor > Applications > Application-Aware Routing

Question 15

A network engineer is analyzing a recurring issue where a specific site experiences intermittent packet loss on its WAN circuit. The engineer wants to determine whether the packet loss is occurring on the underlay or within the overlay tunnel. Which vManage monitoring feature provides the most direct insight into this?

Accepted Answer

Tunnel Health dashboard, which shows BFD session status and SLA metrics per tunnel.. The Tunnel Health dashboard uses BFD to measure packet loss, latency, and jitter on each tunnel. This data is specific to the overlay and can be compared across tunnels to determine if the issue is with the underlay or a particular tunnel. Interface statistics, application monitoring, and syslog do not provide the same level of direct insight into overlay packet loss.

Answer

Interface Statistics, which show error counters and discard rates on the physical WAN interface.

Answer

Application Monitoring, which shows per-application throughput and response times.

Answer

Syslog events, which may contain messages about packet drops on the WAN interface.