You are designing a traffic monitoring and analysis system for a customer. Which traffic monitoring technique would you recommend to place the least amount of burden on the network infrastructure?

SPAN monitor ports require the switch to copy and forward frames to a destination port, consuming switch CPU and memory resources especially at high traffic volumes.

NetFlow requires routers and switches to inspect, cache, and export flow records, adding CPU and memory overhead to active network devices.

IP NBAR performs stateful deep packet inspection on the router CPU to classify applications, which adds significant processing overhead to the forwarding path.

Passive taps operate at the physical layer by splitting the optical or electrical signal to create a copy of traffic without requiring any configuration, processing, or resources from routers or switches. Because the tap is an out-of-band, hardware-only device, it introduces no CPU, memory, or bandwidth overhead on any network infrastructure component.