An organization had an incident with the network availability during which devices unexpectedly malfunctioned. An engineer is investigating the incident and found that the memory pool buffer usage reached a peak before the malfunction. Which action should the engineer take to prevent this issue from reoccurring?

The issue is device malfunction due to memory exhaustion. To prevent this, a proactive monitoring and alerting mechanism is required. Enabling memory threshold notifications configures the device to send an alert (like an SNMP trap or syslog message) when memory usage crosses a predefined critical level. This allows network engineers to intervene and troubleshoot the high memory usage before it leads to a system crash or malfunction, directly addressing the prevention of future incidents.

A. Disable memory limit: This would likely accelerate memory exhaustion and cause the device to malfunction faster, not prevent it.
B. Disable CPU threshold trap toward the SNMP server: This action is irrelevant as it relates to CPU monitoring, not the identified memory issue.
C. Enable memory tracing notifications: Memory tracing is a deep diagnostic tool for finding the root cause of a leak, not a proactive alerting mechanism to prevent a crash.

1. Cisco IOS XE System Management Configuration Guide, Release 3S. "Memory Threshold Notifications" section. This feature allows setting thresholds for processor memory and generating notifications when usage exceeds these levels.

2. Cisco IOS Configuration Fundamentals Command Reference. The memory free low-watermark command is detailed, which sets a low-watermark for available free memory to trigger notifications, serving as a preventative alert mechanism.