What major advantage does a monitoring port have over an inline network tap?

The biggest advantage of a monitoring port over an inline network tap is that if the monitoring port fails, it will not impact the network traffic flow. If an inline device fails, it may impact the network traffic even if it is designed to avoid that scenario. Inline taps don’t have to rely on the performance of the switch, meaning that they are often higher performance; they can be passive, meaning that they cannot be attacked like a switch’s operating system can be; and since inline passive devices simply copy traffic, they are often easier to configure since you merely plug them in.