Courseiva
← Back to Cisco SPCOR / CCNP Service Provider Core 350-501 questions

Scenario-based practice

Hard Difficulty Questions

Practise Cisco SPCOR / CCNP Service Provider Core 350-501 practice questions — original exam-style scenarios covering every exam domain, with detailed explanations, wrong-answer analysis, and common exam traps.

Start full practice testRead exam guide
20
scenario questions
350-501
exam code
Cisco
vendor

Scenario guide

How to approach hard difficulty questions

These are the questions most candidates get wrong. They require connecting multiple concepts, reading tricky output, or knowing edge-case behaviour that isn't on most study cards. Practising them trains you to operate under uncertainty — a necessary skill on the real exam.

Quick answer

Hard Difficulty Questions questions test whether you can apply the concept in context, not just recognise a definition.

How the topic appears in realistic exam-style scenarios.

Which detail in the question changes the correct answer.

How to eliminate plausible but wrong options.

How to connect the question back to the wider exam objective.

Related practice questions

Related 350-501 topic practice pages

Scenario questions usually connect to one or more exam topics. Use these links to review the underlying concepts behind the scenario.

MPLS and Segment Routing practice questions

MPLS and Segment Routing practice questions for 350-501.

Automation and Quality of Services practice questions

Automation and Quality of Services practice questions for 350-501.

Architecture practice questions

Practise 350-501 questions linked to Architecture.

Networking practice questions

Targeted 350-501 practice covering Networking.

Security and Services practice questions

Targeted 350-501 practice covering Security and Services.

Automation and Quality of Service practice questions

Sharpen your 350-501 knowledge of Automation and Quality of Service.

Services practice questions

Targeted 350-501 practice covering Services.

Automation and Assurance practice questions

Work through 350-501 questions on Automation and Assurance.

350-501 fundamentals practice questions

Targeted 350-501 practice covering 350-501 fundamentals.

350-501 scenario practice questions

Sharpen your 350-501 knowledge of 350-501 scenario.

350-501 troubleshooting practice questions

Work through 350-501 questions on 350-501 troubleshooting.

Practice set

Practice scenarios

Question 1hardmulti select
Study the full IPv6 explanation →

A service provider is implementing 6VPE to provide IPv6 L3VPN services. Which two statements about 6VPE are true?

Question 2hardmultiple choice
Study the full QoS explanation →

In a hierarchical QoS policy applied to a subscriber aggregation interface, the parent policy shapes to 100 Mbps and the child policy allocates 50% bandwidth to voice and 50% to data. If voice traffic exceeds 50 Mbps, what happens to the excess?

Question 3hardmultiple choice
Read the full MPLS explanation →

An SP is troubleshooting an MPLS L2VPN VPLS network where MAC flapping is occurring between two PEs. Which mechanism in VPLS prevents loops and ensures that a broadcast frame from one PE is not reflected back to the originating PE?

Question 4hardmultiple choice
Review the full routing breakdown →

An engineer configures an SR-TE policy with a segment list containing adjacency SIDs. The required path includes a strict loose hop through a specific router. Which segment type should be used for the strict hop?

Question 5hardmultiple choice
Open the full BGP breakdown →

Refer to the exhibit. Which statement about this BGP configuration is true?

Exhibit

Refer to the exhibit.
! On PE router
router bgp 65000
 neighbor 10.1.1.1 remote-as 65000
 neighbor 10.1.1.1 update-source Loopback0
 !
 address-family vpnv4
  neighbor 10.1.1.1 activate
  neighbor 10.1.1.1 send-community extended
  neighbor 10.1.1.1 next-hop-self
 !
 address-family ipv4 vrf CUST_A
  redistribute ospf 1 vrf CUST_A
  no synchronization
 !
!
Question 6hardmultiple choice
Read the full VPN explanation →

An SP deploys EVPN to provide L2VPN services with multi-homing. The customer CE is dual-homed to two different PE routers. Which EVPN mechanism ensures that only one PE forwards traffic to the CE for a given Ethernet segment, preventing loops?

Question 7hardmultiple choice
Open the full BGP breakdown →

In an MPLS L3VPN network with route reflectors, what is the default behavior regarding the BGP next-hop attribute for reflected VPNv4 routes?

Question 8hardmultiple choice
Read the full MPLS explanation →

A service provider is deploying a new MPLS core with Segment Routing and requires fast convergence upon link failure. They plan to use TI-LFA (Topology Independent Loop-Free Alternate). What is a prerequisite for TI-LFA to provide protection against any single link failure?

Question 9hardmultiple choice
Read the full MPLS explanation →

An operator is deploying EVPN-VPWS over an MPLS network. Which component uniquely identifies a multihomed Ethernet segment in EVPN?

Question 10hardmultiple choice
Open the full BGP breakdown →

An SP detects a volumetric DDoS attack targeting a customer network. The SP uses Cisco's S/RTBH technique to drop attack traffic. Which action is performed by the edge routers upon receiving a BGP route with a specific community?

Question 11hardmultiple choice
Read the full REST/YANG explanation →

Refer to the exhibit. An engineer pushes this XML configuration via NETCONF, but the device rejects it with an error stating 'invalid policy-map structure'. What is the problem?

Exhibit

<config xmlns:xc="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:netconf:base:1.0">
  <native xmlns="http://cisco.com/ns/yang/Cisco-IOS-XE-native">
    <policy>
      <policy-map>
        <name>QOS-POLICY</name>
        <class>
          <name>VOICE</name>
          <priority>
            <level>1</level>
          </priority>
          <police>
            <cir>64000</cir>
            <bc>8000</bc>
            <conform-action>
              <transmit/>
            </conform-action>
            <exceed-action>
              <drop/>
            </exceed-action>
          </police>
        </class>
      </policy-map>
    </policy>
  </native>
</config>
Question 12hardmultiple choice
Read the full MPLS explanation →

Based on the exhibit, what is the purpose of the 'mpls ldp neighbor ... password cisco' commands?

Exhibit

Refer to the exhibit.

interface GigabitEthernet0/0
 ip address 192.168.1.1 255.255.255.252
 mpls ip
 mpls mtu 1500
 no shutdown

interface GigabitEthernet0/1
 ip address 192.168.2.1 255.255.255.252
 mpls ip
 mpls mtu 1500
 no shutdown

router ospf 1
 network 192.168.1.0 0.0.0.3 area 0
 network 192.168.2.0 0.0.0.3 area 0

mpls label protocol ldp
mpls ldp router-id Loopback0 force

mpls ldp neighbor 192.168.1.2 password cisco
mpls ldp neighbor 192.168.2.2 password cisco
Question 13hardmultiple choice
Read the full VRF explanation →

Based on the exhibit, why is the route 10.10.10.0/24 from remote PE not installed in the VRF Customer-A on PE1?

Exhibit

Refer to the exhibit.

PE1#show ip bgp vpnv4 vrf Customer-A 10.10.10.0/24
BGP routing table entry for 10.10.10.0/24, version 6
Paths: (2 available, best #2, table Customer-A)
  Advertised to update-groups:
     1
  Refresh Epoch 2
  Local
    65000 65001
      10.1.1.1 (metric 20) from 10.1.1.1 (192.168.1.1)
        Origin IGP, metric 0, localpref 100, valid, internal, best
        Extended Community: RT:100:100
        mpls labels in/out vpn-label:24000
        rx pathid: 0, tx pathid: 0x0
      Path #2: (not installed because of route-target mismatch?)
  Not advertised to any peer

PE1#show run | section vrf Customer-A
vrf Customer-A
 rd 100:1
 route-target export 100:100
 route-target import 200:200
!
Question 14hardmultiple choice
Study the full QoS explanation →

An SP router is configured with a hierarchical QoS policy (parent policy shaper, child policy with CBWFQ). When applying this policy to an interface, the router reports 'Policy map not found' error. What is the most likely cause?

Question 15hardmultiple choice
Study the full QoS explanation →

During a maintenance window, an automation script pushed a QoS policy that inadvertently changed the marking for all inbound traffic on a core interface. The change was rolled back, but performance reports show that some traffic is still being marked incorrectly. What is the most logical explanation?

Question 16hardmulti select
Read the full VPN explanation →

Which THREE of the following L3VPN services require the use of a dedicated control plane per VPN instance?

Question 17hardmultiple choice
Read the full MPLS explanation →

A network engineer is designing a Layer 2 VPN using EVPN with MPLS data plane. The customer requires all-hub multipoint connectivity with optimal multicast replication. Which EVPN route type is used to advertise multicast group membership?

Question 18hardmultiple choice
Study the full IPv6 explanation →

In SRv6, which SID behavior is used to achieve L3VPN IPv6 VPN forwarding, where the SID points to a VPN instance and performs decapsulation and IPv6 lookup?

Question 19hardmultiple choice
Open the full BGP breakdown →

A large service provider operates a national MPLS backbone with over 200 P routers and 500 PE routers. They use IS-IS as the IGP with segment routing and have deployed TI-LFA for link and node protection. Recently, a core router (P1) suffered a complete failure, and during the failure, traffic for some prefixes was dropped for over 200ms. After the failure, the network recovered within seconds. The engineer suspects that TI-LFA did not provide the expected sub-50ms protection for some destinations. Further analysis reveals that the affected prefixes have their BGP next-hop on a router that is multiple hops away, and the P1 failure impacted both the primary path and the backup path computed by TI-LFA. The engineer reviews the TI-LFA configuration and finds that 'fast-reroute per-prefix ti-lfa' is enabled under router isis. The engineer also notes that P1 was not a protecting node for those prefixes. Which action should the engineer take to improve convergence time for these prefixes?

Question 20hardmultiple choice
Full question →

A service provider wants to provide point-to-point Ethernet services with strict SLAs. Which technology should they use?

These 350-501 practice questions are part of Courseiva's free Cisco certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style 350-501 questions with detailed explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics.