A company experiences intermittent network slowdowns. The network administrator suspects certain ports are being overutilized. Which tool would provide real-time bandwidth consumption per port?

Correct answer: SNMP monitoring with bandwidth graphing

SNMP monitoring with bandwidth graphing tools such as MRTG, Cacti, or SolarWinds polls interface counters on switches and routers via SNMP to produce real-time and historical throughput graphs per port, making it the correct tool for identifying overutilized ports. Option A is incorrect because tracert traces the hop-by-hop path to a destination and provides latency per hop, but gives no information about port-level bandwidth utilization. Option C is incorrect because Wireshark is a packet capture and protocol analysis tool useful for deep inspection of individual traffic flows, but it does not provide aggregate per-port bandwidth statistics across a switch's interfaces. Option D is incorrect because ping measures round-trip latency and packet loss to a single target and provides no bandwidth or port utilization data.