CV0-004 Operations and Support Practice Test 9 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company wants to reduce cloud costs by identifying underutilized EC2 instances. Which AWS service provides rightsizing recommendations?

Accepted Answer

AWS Compute Optimizer. AWS Compute Optimizer analyzes historical utilization metrics of EC2 instances and provides rightsizing recommendations to identify underutilized or overprovisioned instances. It uses machine learning to recommend optimal instance types based on CPU, memory, network, and disk usage, directly addressing the goal of reducing costs by identifying underutilized instances.

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AWS Budgets

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AWS Trusted Advisor

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AWS Cost Explorer

Question 2

A cloud operations team is designing a disaster recovery plan that includes regular testing. Which TWO activities should be part of the DR testing process? (Select TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Chaos engineering experiments. Option C (Chaos engineering experiments) is correct because deliberately injecting controlled failures into the environment validates that failover, redundancy, and recovery mechanisms actually work under real-world fault conditions, which is a core goal of DR testing. Option D (Scheduled DR drills) is correct because recurring, planned exercises such as failover/failback tests and tabletop simulations verify that recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) can be met and that runbooks and personnel are effective. Option A (Updating security patches) is a routine vulnerability-management task, not a DR test, even though patching supports overall resilience. Option B (Reviewing billing reports) is a cost-management activity unrelated to validating recovery capabilities. Option E (Performing daily backups) is a data-protection prerequisite that DR testing depends on, but the backup operation itself is not a test of recovery readiness.

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Updating security patches

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Reviewing billing reports

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Performing daily backups

Question 3

A company uses AWS and wants to implement structured logging for their applications to improve queryability. Which THREE practices should they follow? (Select THREE.)

Accepted Answer

Include timestamp, severity, and request ID in each log entry. Option B is correct because including timestamp, severity, and request ID in each log entry provides the essential contextual fields needed for filtering, correlating, and troubleshooting requests across distributed services. Option C is correct because a consistent schema across all services ensures that queries, dashboards, and log-processing pipelines can reliably parse and aggregate logs without per-service custom logic. Option D is correct because writing logs in JSON format produces machine-readable, structured events with named fields, which is the foundation for queryability in tools like Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights or Athena. Option A is not appropriate because dumping all logs into a single unpartitioned S3 bucket hurts query performance and increases scan costs, since partitioning by date or service is a best practice. Option E is not part of structured logging; KMS encryption at rest is a security control and does not improve the structure or queryability of log data.

Answer

Send all logs to a single S3 bucket without partitioning

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Encrypt log files at rest using AWS KMS

Question 4

An organization is using Azure and wants to implement a patch management strategy with minimal disruption. Which TWO actions should they take? (Select TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Implement rollback procedures. Option A (Implement rollback procedures) is correct because a rollback plan allows the organization to revert a patch that causes regressions or outages, directly supporting minimal disruption by limiting the blast radius and downtime of a failed update. Option B (Define maintenance windows for patching) is correct because scheduling patches during controlled, low-traffic periods prevents unexpected reboots and performance impacts during business hours, which is the core of a minimal-disruption patch management strategy. Option C is incorrect because relying solely on manual patching is error-prone, does not scale, and increases the risk of missed or inconsistently applied updates. Option D is incorrect because patching all servers simultaneously maximizes the chance of a widespread outage and removes the ability to validate patches on a subset first. Option E is incorrect because disabling automatic updates on all VMs leaves systems unpatched and exposed to known vulnerabilities, contradicting a sound patch management strategy.

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Use only manual patching

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Patch all servers simultaneously

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Disable automatic updates on all VMs

Question 5

A company uses a multi-cloud strategy with workloads in AWS and Azure. The cloud team wants a centralized log management solution to correlate security events across both platforms. Which approach is most suitable?

Accepted Answer

Deploy a third-party SIEM solution such as Splunk. A third-party SIEM such as Splunk is the most suitable approach because it is platform-agnostic and can ingest logs from AWS, Azure, and other sources into a centralized correlation engine. It provides cross-cloud security event correlation, alerting, and compliance reporting out of the box. This directly addresses the requirement for centralized log management across multi-cloud environments.

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Use AWS CloudWatch Logs with cross-account log groups

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Use GCP Cloud Logging with a log sink to BigQuery

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Use Azure Log Analytics and forward AWS logs to it via an agent

Question 6

A cloud architect is designing a disaster recovery plan for a critical application with an RTO of 15 minutes and an RPO of 1 minute. The application runs on AWS EC2 instances with data stored on EBS volumes. Which replication strategy best meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Continuous replication using AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery. An RPO of 1 minute requires near-continuous data replication, which AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (DRS) provides by continuously replicating block-level changes from source EC2/EBS to a staging area in the target region. Snapshots every hour (RPO up to 60 min) and daily AMIs (RPO up to 24 h) cannot meet a 1-minute RPO. S3 CRR is irrelevant because the data lives on EBS, not S3.

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EBS snapshots replicated to another region every hour

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Daily AMI backups stored in a different region

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Cross-region replication of S3 buckets

Question 7

An organization wants to reduce cloud costs by identifying underutilized EC2 instances. Which AWS service provides rightsizing recommendations?

Accepted Answer

AWS Compute Optimizer. AWS Compute Optimizer analyzes CloudWatch metrics and resource configurations to generate rightsizing recommendations for EC2 instances, including whether instances are over-provisioned. It uses machine learning to compare your workload against historical patterns and provides specific instance type recommendations, directly addressing the goal of identifying underutilized EC2 instances.

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AWS Budgets

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AWS Trusted Advisor

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AWS Cost Explorer

Question 8

A cloud administrator is configuring an auto-scaling group for a web application. The application experiences predictable traffic spikes every weekday at 9 AM. Which scaling policy is most appropriate?

Accepted Answer

Scheduled scaling to add instances before 9 AM. The traffic spike is predictable (every weekday at 9 AM), and scheduled scaling pre-provisions capacity before the spike begins, avoiding the lag inherent in reactive policies. This is the canonical use case for scheduled scaling in AWS Auto Scaling, Azure VMSS, and GCP MIG.

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Step scaling with a cool-down period

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Simple scaling with a 300-second cooldown

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Target tracking scaling based on average CPU utilization

Question 9

A cloud engineer is troubleshooting a network connectivity issue between two VPCs in AWS. To analyze traffic patterns and identify dropped packets, which feature should be enabled?

Accepted Answer

VPC Flow Logs. VPC Flow Logs capture information about IP traffic going to and from network interfaces in a VPC, useful for troubleshooting connectivity and security issues.

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AWS CloudTrail

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Amazon Inspector

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AWS X-Ray

Question 10

A cloud administrator notices that an application's latency has increased. The application is distributed across multiple microservices. Which tool can help trace requests across services to identify the bottleneck?

Accepted Answer

Distributed tracing tool. A distributed tracing tool is designed to follow a single request as it propagates through multiple microservices, capturing spans, timing, and parent-child relationships. This lets the administrator pinpoint which service or call in the chain is adding latency. Centralized logging aggregates logs but does not natively reconstruct cross-service request paths with timing.

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Centralized logging service

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Vulnerability assessment tool

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Audit logging service

Question 11

A company is planning to migrate to AWS and wants to achieve the lowest possible compute costs for a steady-state workload that will run 24/7. Which purchasing option should be recommended?

Accepted Answer

Reserved Instances. Reserved Instances provide a significant discount (up to 72%) compared to On-Demand pricing in exchange for a one- or three-year commitment, making them ideal for steady-state workloads that run 24/7. Because the workload is predictable and continuous, the commitment is easily justified and the effective hourly cost is minimized. This is the standard AWS recommendation for long-running, stable compute.

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Spot Instances

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On-Demand Instances

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Dedicated Hosts

Question 12

A cloud administrator needs to set up a centralized logging solution to collect logs from multiple projects. Which cloud service should be used?

Accepted Answer

Logging service. A centralized logging service is designed to aggregate, store, and analyze log data from multiple sources, including multiple projects. In cloud environments, this is typically a dedicated logging service (such as Google Cloud Logging, AWS CloudWatch Logs, or Azure Monitor Logs) that can collect logs across projects and provide querying and retention. Option B is the correct choice.

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Monitoring service

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Serverless function service

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Audit logs service

Question 13

A cloud operations team is preparing for a disaster recovery drill for a multi-tier application. Which TWO activities are essential for verifying the effectiveness of the DR plan? (Select TWO.)

Accepted Answer

Verify the RTO and RPO are achieved. Option A is correct because the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) are the measurable targets that define how quickly and how much data the DR plan must restore, so verifying they are actually achieved during the drill is the core proof that the plan meets business requirements. Option D is correct because a failover test to the DR site exercises the real recovery procedures—bringing up the standby environment, redirecting traffic, and validating application functionality—which is the only way to confirm the plan works end to end rather than just on paper. The remaining options, while valuable in other contexts, are not essential DR effectiveness checks: reviewing the incident response plan (B) addresses incident handling rather than recovery validation, updating the asset inventory (C) is a documentation/hygiene task, and conducting a security audit (E) assesses security controls, not recovery capability.

Answer

Review the incident response plan

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Update the asset inventory

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Conduct a security audit

Question 14

A cloud administrator is tasked with monitoring CPU utilization across a fleet of virtual machines. Which cloud service should be used to collect and visualize this metric?

Accepted Answer

Cloud monitoring service. A cloud monitoring service is specifically designed to collect, aggregate, and visualize performance metrics like CPU utilization from virtual machines and other resources. It provides time-series data storage, dashboards, and alerting capabilities, making it the correct tool for this task. Other services focus on different operational aspects such as logging, configuration, or recommendations, not real-time metric collection and visualization.

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Audit logging service

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Configuration management service

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Advisor or optimization service

Question 15

A company is migrating on-premises workloads to a public cloud. The disaster recovery plan requires an RTO of 15 minutes and an RPO of 5 minutes. Which replication strategy should be used for a critical database?

Accepted Answer

Continuous replication to a standby instance in another region. Continuous replication to a standby instance in another region provides an RPO of near-zero (often seconds) and an RTO of minutes, as the standby can be promoted quickly. This meets the required RPO of 5 minutes and RTO of 15 minutes. Continuous replication ensures that data changes are replicated asynchronously or synchronously, depending on configuration, minimizing data loss.

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Weekly full backups with daily incrementals stored in the same region

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Scheduled snapshots every hour with cross-region copy

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Daily snapshots replicated cross-region