Which function is performed by the data plane?

Question

Options

• ALog indexing
• BService engine lifecycle management
• CConfiguration backups
• DPool health monitoring

• A
  5% (2)
• B
  3% (1)
• C
  5% (2)
• D
  87% (33)

Explanation

Pool health monitoring is a data plane function because service engines - the data plane components - actively probe backend pool members in real time to determine availability, ensuring traffic is only forwarded to healthy endpoints. This is an operational, traffic-adjacent task that must happen continuously at the forwarding layer.

Why the distractors are wrong:

• A (Log indexing) is a management-plane or analytics function - logs are aggregated and indexed by centralized components, not the forwarding layer.
• B (Service engine lifecycle management) is a control-plane function; the controller (not the service engines themselves) handles spinning up, scaling, and retiring service engines.
• C (Configuration backups) is also a control-plane/management task - the controller owns system configuration and backup operations.

Memory tip: Think data plane = doing the work of data delivery. Anything that keeps traffic flowing - health checks, load balancing decisions, SSL offload - lives in the data plane. If it's about managing the system itself (configs, backups, lifecycle), it belongs to the control or management plane.

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