Techniques are described for suppressing data plane traffic using a service monitoring policy for data plane control. If a service provided to a router becomes nonfunctional, preventing the router from being able to forward traffic to a next-hop device, data plane traffic from client devices on the data plane that requires the use of the nonfunctioning service is suppressed. Additionally, new communication pathways to the router that will use the nonfunctioning service are prevented from being established. Traffic is redirected to another router with a functioning service. Thus, traffic that may normally be directed to the router with the nonfunctioning service and not able to be forwarded (e.g., blackholing of data) can be forwarded to the other router.